How I Discovered Hyperthermia for Lyme Disease and Why

It Works
http://www.prohealth.com/lyme/library/showarticle.cfm?libid=29931
By Friedrich Douwes, MD and Connie Strasheim www.ProHealth.com February 7, 2017

Friedrich Douwes, MD, who uses hyperthermia to treat Lyme disease and cancer.
Reprinted from New Paradigms in Lyme Disease Treatment: 10 Top Doctors Reveal Healing Strategies
that Work, with the kind permission of Friedrich R. Douwes, MD and Connie Strasheim. To learn more
about the book and to read more about Dr. Douwes treatment approach, see:
www.NewLymeTreatments.com.

It was entirely by coincidence that I began treating Lyme disease patients and ended up discovering a
groundbreaking new treatment for Lyme. It started in 2000, when two cancer patients who also had
Lyme disease came to my clinic. One was from Boston, and the other was from Canada. The Canadian
woman had advanced breast cancer with metastases to her lungs, liver and bones. When I took a history
on these women, both told me that they actually suffered more from symptoms of Lyme than from
symptoms of cancer! Their symptoms were typical of cancer, but because I had not worked with Lyme
disease patients before, I did not know that some of their symptoms could also be due to Lyme disease.

I gave them whole-body hyperthermia treatments for their cancers. Hyperthermia in its various forms is
a very effective and well-researched cancer treatment. Cancer cells die in the presence of high heat, so
many doctors worldwide use hyperthermia on their cancer patients.

There are different types of hyperthermia, including whole-body hyperthermia, which is what we give
both our Lyme and cancer patients. For this, the patient lies down inside of a special thermal chamber
similar to a large incubator. It heats the bodys tissues to 41.6 Celsius (or 107 Fahrenheit). It takes
two hours to raise the body to this temperature. Once there, the body is maintained at this temperature
for two hours. After the treatment, it takes two more hours for the body to cool down, which means that
the patients temperature is elevated for a total of six hours.

Once the body has reached the maximum temperature, we administer chemotherapy (for our cancer
patients). Chemotherapy is activated and potentiated by heat, so hyperthermia makes it more effective.
We have had such great success with this kind of treatment approach that our clinic has become well
known internationally as a cancer treatment center, and we now see patients from all over the world.

Anyway, after these two women received hyperthermia treatment for their cancers, they told us that
their Lyme symptoms had also disappeared! The brain fog, tingling in their fingers, fatigue and
other symptomswere all gone. We had associated the tingling with polyneuropathy, which is a side
effect of chemotherapy, but in these women, it was a symptom caused by Lyme.

I pondered this and said to my work colleagues, Do you remember that before there were antibiotics,
doctors treated syphilis (which is similar to Borrelia in its composition, structure and behavior) by
intentionally infecting patients with malaria to induce a fever, which then killed the syphilis? The
treatment was called malariotherapy. Doctors would then give the syphilis patients the age-old drug
quinine to control the fever and kill the malaria. Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg at Vienna University
was one of the first authorities in syphilis treatment, and he won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
in 1927 for his discoveries.

When I recalled that doctors used to treat syphilis with heat, it made me wonder whether
hyperthermia also might be effective against Borrelia, since the Borrelia organism is similar in its
characteristics to syphilis. I said to my colleagues, Could it be that our whole-body hyperthermia
treatments could also be effective for Lyme disease?
I researched the medical literature to discover whether any studies supported my hypothesis, and I
found one that was conducted by a group of Swedish researchers in 1996. In the study, the researchers
proved that Borrelia was thermolabile, or susceptible to destruction by heat, and could not
tolerate high temperatures. At 39 C (or 102.2 F), they found that the spirochetes became
immobile, and at 40 C (or 104 F) they shed their outer membrane, but when they were exposed to a
temperature of 41.6 C (or 106.9 F) for two hours, 100 percent of the bacteria died.

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 I was excited to discover this, and I told my colleagues that this was exactly what we were doing by
treating patients using hyperthermia; we were raising their body temperature to 41.6 C for two hours.
So I suggested that we do this treatment on some Lyme disease patients just to see what would happen.
I wanted to find out whether my theory had any substance, because up until this point, we had only
been treating cancer patients.

Shortly thereafter, we found four or five patients with advanced Lyme disease, and gave them two
whole-body hyperthermia treatments. We also gave them intravenous antibiotic therapy during the
treatments and found that not only did the heat kill the microbes, but that the antibiotics were also more
effective when their bodies temperature was elevated. This phenomenon was described in the Swedish
study. According to the researchers of the study, if you administer Ceftriaxone or another antibiotic after
elevating the patients body temperature to 41.6, the medications activity becomes amplified 60-
fold.

From our research and clinical observations, we discovered three things:

1) Hyperthermia kills Lyme microbes

2) Hyperthermia increases the effectiveness of antibiotics
3) Hyperthermia decreases microbes resistance to antibiotics and enables antibiotics to get inside the
cells much more easily.

After I had treated somewhere between five and seven patients with Lyme disease, I decided to attend a
medical conference in the United States to learn more about the disease. While there, I sat next to a
cardiologist who told me that he had been attending the conference because his entire family had been
infected with Lyme while on vacation in Austria. His wife was bedridden; his daughter had been a
medical student, but could no longer attend medical school, and his younger son, who was a 10-year-old
prodigy who had played the violin in public, could no longer even hold a violin and was unable to attend
school.

I told the doctor that I had just discovered a new treatment for Lyme disease that was possibly superior
to any other treatment modality out there, although it had only been tested on a few patients so far. The
man, figuring that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain, traveled to Klinik St. Georg with his
wife, son and daughter, and I treated them all with hyperthermia.

The results were amazing. The whole family got well, and the wife ended up going back to work in her
husbands clinic. The daughter finished medical school, and the son was able to play the violin again, and
today as far as I know is the symphony conductor at his college. Successfully treating this family was
the turning point for us in our approach to Lyme disease.

Our Success Rate with Hyperthermia

Not long after treating this family, we began to treat many more people with Lyme disease maybe 50
per year initially. Now, we treat 150-200 people per year, and statistically, the patients that we see are
those who have a long history of disease and who have seen somewhere between 10 and 20 doctors.
They are people who have received all kinds of conventional and natural treatments, from nutrition to
antibioticsto you name it. So, when they get here, they are so-called lost causes, because no
treatment or doctor has been able to help them thus far.

Fortunately, we have found that we are able to get over 60 percent of these patients back to life by
using hyperthermia, along with a variety of adjunct treatments. By the time they leave our clinic, they
are functioning well and are able to return to work and live a normal life. And, I have many testimonials
to prove this. You can find some of these on the Klink St. Georg website:
CancerClinicStGeorg.com/en/patients-testimonials.

Another 30 percent of our patients improve with the treatment, but still require additional treatments to
get better. These are generally people whose bodies need repair from the damage caused by Lyme
disease.

The remaining 10 percent of our patients do not experience any improvement. Now, keep in mind that
we treat the most advanced cases of Lyme disease; people for whom every other treatment approach

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out there has failed. These people are the worst of the worst.

Yet, the results that we have had for others have been miraculous. We have seen people who were once
bedridden or who used to have seizures every 50 minutes, or who were unable to even communicate,
get well. We have seen people who were once given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and who couldnt
walk, return to having a normal life.

Since 2000, I have treated over 850 Lyme disease patients with mostly good results. Since we use
antibiotics in conjunction with hyperthermia, I like to call our treatment approach Antibiotic-Augmented
Thermal Eradication (AAT) of Lyme disease.

Hyperthermia is probably the only treatment out there that can eradicate Borrelia infections nearly
100 percent, because the heat goes deep into the connective tissue and joints, where most
conventional treatments cant penetrate. And, unlike other modalities, the microbes cant develop
resistance to this type of treatment. Of course, its unlikely that any modality can eradicate the microbes
completely, because a 100 percent eradication rate doesnt exist in medicine, but I feel that we have one
of the highest rates of success in eliminating Borrelia.

Once we eliminate the Borrelia organisms with hyperthermia and antibiotics, the amount of Lyme
neurotoxins in the body is also immediately and automatically reduced. This is because Borrelia throws
out neurotoxins in the body literally every minute or every second, so once it is gone, this can no longer
happen. Neurotoxins are one of the principal causes of symptoms in people with Lyme disease, especially
neurological and rheumatic symptoms, and joint inflammation. They cause chronic, silent inflammation
that is sometimes difficult to diagnose, but which causes other symptoms.

So we find that as soon as we eliminate the Borrelia, then the neurotoxins in the body also
diminish to almost nothing, as does the inflammation. Weve had patients here that used to have
seizures (a sign of encephalitis and brain inflammation), but as soon as their Borrelia was
eliminated, their inflammation and seizures disappeared, too. It really has been remarkable.

About Friedrich R. Douwes, MD

Friedrich R. Douwes, MD, is a medical doctor and Director of Klinik St. Georg, a world-renowned clinic in Bad Aibling,
Germany, which specializes in the treatment of cancer, Lyme disease and other chronic health conditions, using
conventional and complementary therapies. Dr. Douwes has treated cancer patients for over 40 years, and Lyme
disease patients for over 16 years, since approximately the year 2000.

Dr. Douwes studied medicine in Germany and Switzerland and received his board certification in Internal Medicine in
1975 at the University Hospital Gttingen. He completed his fellowship in hematology and oncology at Hahnemann
University in Philadelphia. Subsequently, he became the medical director of Sonnenberg Hospital, an oncology,
hematology, immunology and oncological rehabilitation center, in Bad Sooden-Allendorf, Germany.

While at Sonnenberg Hospital, Dr. Douwes was dissatisfied with the outcomes that he saw with conventional cancer
treatment, so he developed his own philosophy of integrative holistic medicine. Some hospitals, including the
Veramed Hospitals in Brannenburg and Biomed Klinik in Bergzabern, Germany, now follow this model of medicine.

Dr. Douwes has continued to work actively and research new cancer therapies in addition to better treatments for
Lyme disease and other chronic illnesses. He has become the go-to specialist for all kinds of hyperthermia
treatment, including whole body, loco-regional and urethral prostate treatment protocols, and has successfully
treated thousands of patients from all over the world, including many from Canada and the United States.

For many years, Dr. Douwes served as First Chairman of the charitable organization, Friends of Integrated Cancer
Therapy. He is also President of the German Society for Oncology (DGO) and Founder of the German Society for
Biological Cancer Control (GfBK) and Hyperthermia (DGHT).

Dr. Douwes organizes seminars and conferences for physicians and therapists, which focus on biological cancer
treatments. In 2011, he organized the first International Congress for Complementary Oncology, an event that
features a variety of international guest speakers who focus on integrative cancer treatment approaches.

Dr. Douwes is also a sought-after international lecturer at seminars and conferences. Numerous films about his
work have been made, including Life with Cancer, which was an award-winning film project. Norwegian television
has also broadcast a 45-minute film about his work with cancer patients and his work has also been featured on
both German and international television.

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In 2015, Dr. Douwes received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Comprehensive Integrative
Medicine (ACIM) for his contributions to the advancement of the art and science of medicine, specifically as it
relates to integrative oncology.

Dr. Douwes has authored countless scientific papers, which have been published in German and international
journals. His work has been featured in Biological Medicine, Internal Journal of Clinical Oncology, Alternative
Medicine, Journal for Alternative Complementary Therapy, New England Journal of Medicine, The
Lancet and Excerpta Medica. His work is also featured in several books.

What sets Dr. Douwes apart more than anything else is his warm and compassionate manner toward his patients.
This, combined with his abundant knowledge about Lyme disease, cancer and other health conditions, makes him a
unique person whom you will want on your side to overcome illness. To learn more about Dr. Douwes work and
Klink St. Georg see: CancerClinicStGeorg.com.