There is a long history of cases in which a patient with cancer has made a miraculous recovery following an infection, and especially with fever (cancer cells have massively disrupted heat shock proteins which are usually mutated into non-existence in the pathway to uncontrolled replication and loss of cell cycle regulatory proteins) - additionally, fever increases the function of immune cells.
The earliest case reports I remember date back to the 1600s and for a short time in the late 19th early 20th century there were doctors that practiced that way however the results seemed highly variable and generally fell by the wayside.
It is great to think that this might be true, there is certainly evidence to suggest it is somewhat credible but like anything we will require more evidence before we can claim that it 'changes everything'. We can always hope though.
- ps apologies for lack of sources, I'm on mobile, I'm a doctor working on an oncology ward and I just had my worst day in my 5 month long career today and hardly in the mood to do the research legwork required to substantiate my claims. Google will help - start with hyperthermia therapy if interested in going down the rabbithole
Thank you for the link, this is quite interesting.
If I may ask a stupid question, wouldn't this imply that cancer rates should be lower in tropical countries, where the ambient temperature is consistently >40°C ?
I've never heard anything like that, but you must remember that it is body temperature that is important and it is never normally above ~37.5
Thee is actually a really interesting paper, tangentially related, on sepsis (blood borne infections) which randomised ICU patients to have either aggressive temperature management (ie fans, active cooling and paracetamol) vs allowing the temperature to rise as high as 39.9. Although the study was small in size(I think there were roughly 15 in each arm) the 'permitted fever' arm had only 2-3 fatalities vs 14 in the aggressive fever management arm. I actually have that paper on my desktop and will dig it up
The earliest case reports I remember date back to the 1600s and for a short time in the late 19th early 20th century there were doctors that practiced that way however the results seemed highly variable and generally fell by the wayside.
It is great to think that this might be true, there is certainly evidence to suggest it is somewhat credible but like anything we will require more evidence before we can claim that it 'changes everything'. We can always hope though.
- ps apologies for lack of sources, I'm on mobile, I'm a doctor working on an oncology ward and I just had my worst day in my 5 month long career today and hardly in the mood to do the research legwork required to substantiate my claims. Google will help - start with hyperthermia therapy if interested in going down the rabbithole