WHY CAN'T I GET BETTER - HEAT – THERMAL THERAPIES

Welcome back to Medicine Health. Dr. Paul Anderson. I'm Dr. Paul, and today in our series, Why Can't I Get Better from My Chronic You Fill in the Blank Illness, we're talking about therapies that may be helpful. And today's grouping of therapies are going to be interventional things. So we're talking about things like hyperbaric oxygen, IV nutrient therapy, photodynamic therapy, and this particular module topic is going to be heat or thermal therapies. So Heat, probably the oldest or one of the oldest medical treatments in all of humanity going back as far as we have records. If you look at medical treatments from as far ago as you can go back in history, heat and cold, heating and cooling the body, things like water and plant medicines are probably the oldest types of medicines that we have. Now, certainly many others, but Heat goes way back. And so then you start to think, well, gosh, you know, I mean, this is heat. Is thermal therapy really going to help me with anything? Well, they're kind of like a lot of things we've talked about. There's a lot of range when it comes to thermal therapies. And so it could be all the way from doing something like working out and just getting yourself sweating to a sauna. or some other device that heats your body up, all the way to a medical hyperthermia device. So that's a pretty big spectrum, and the spectrum tends to be how hot do you get the human body. Now, as with all things, you know, this is information. This is not giving you prescribing or medical advice. So if you're going to do a thermal therapy, you know, of any kind, work with somebody who's you know, a professional at it. If it involves a device, you really want to get some advice on how to use the device, how long to be in there, who's monitoring you, all of that business. And if it's one of these high-end medical hyperthermia devices like we use in the hospital, a lot of times with infectious disease patients or cancer patients, those often require even higher levels of monitoring. There's some of those procedures where we literally have somebody sitting Medicated. So there's anesthesia involved and nursing monitoring and everything so that the body can be heated up that much. Some of them, a particular organ is heated up to a very high level, but the rest of the body is left alone. We call that local regional hyperthermia. And then there's other ways to use heat. Well, there's a lot of different things about heat that can be beneficial to you, beneficial to your body, et cetera. And so when we think of heat and thermal therapies, there's this giant range, and it goes all the way from your current body temperature. The, you know, the average Fahrenheit is 98.6, so to speak. A lot of people are a little cooler than that, but somewhere around 98 to 99 degrees. So in research, they have divided up the levels of hyperthermia into 4 categories. And they go from just a little warmer than you are right now to very, very hot. And the very, very hot end, the grade 3 and 4 hyperthermia, is generally only done in a facility under medical supervision, et cetera. And that's because you're heating the person's body up to the point where they need a lot of monitoring. They may need some specialized fluids going into their body. I have helped to develop rehydration formulas for hyperthermia where the person is actually sedated. They're consciously sedated by anesthesia, and then we run these IV fluids in them with a balance of electrolytes so that they stay hydrated while we heat them up, you know, to those really high degrees. Like I said, in the hospital, sometimes that might be used for infectious illness, like, you know, people with complex Lyme and other problems. It might be used for cancer. It can be used for any number of things. In other settings where I've been teaching internationally, especially with radiation oncologists and other oncologists from Europe and Asia, It's not uncommon that hyperthermia, medical hyperthermia as you would do it in the hospital, as I described, is combined with radiation therapy for cancer and other things. Then I have colleagues who do high-level hyperthermia treatments, and they do them in a, you know, well-equipped outpatient facility with a lot of monitoring, and they'll use them in, in the setting of cancer. And the nice thing about hyperthermia is that you have Um, a synergy with just about every other treatment you could think of for cancer. And the other thing is that the heat changes your body's biology in a way where it starts to become, uh, not only unfriendly for foreign things like cancer infections, but also it shifts the body chemistry around, the immune chemistry, so that you are— Yeah. are kind of pushed into a direction where you can try and heal or try and get ahead of the process that's going on in your body. So hyperthermia is very, very important as a therapy. Now, what about at the lower end of it? Let's say you're not gonna go to the hospital and get a hyperthermia treatment or something, and no one's gonna prescribe that for you. As I said, you can heat yourself up. Any way that you heat yourself up and get yourself sweating is a hyperthermia experience. Some people will do that by working out. Some people will work out with a little bit extra clothing on, always be cleared by your doctor to do any workout. Don't take this as advice. Be cleared by your doctor to do sauna, any other thing that you're gonna do. And then other people will do the workout, then they'll go in the sauna for a while. Now, if you've ever been in a sauna and you maybe have been a little bit too toxic, then you can feel kind of sick as your body detoxes with the heat. So sometimes with toxic folks, we have to go real short, but saunas can be helpful for helping to remove chemical and metal toxicity. I'll put some links in about that. They can be improving of quality of life, and they also— the heat can actually turn on a lot of your enzyme systems and your immune chemistry again to go in a direction of heating your body up but also pushing your immune system towards pushing out unwanted infectious or other material. So we use lower level of heat. That would be a grade 1 or 2. Remember I said grade 3 and 4 hyperthermia is usually reserved for hospitals or big clinics that have facility for it. Grade 1 and 2 you can do with saunas, etc. Very, very useful. And I will put— I have got a few links here that I will put in. As always with everything, you know, I have got backup links for what we talk about, other videos to link, and those are going to go in the show notes. Those will be on the CTR feed when we have the recording. They'll be on our PodBurners and then on the YouTube channel, which is DRA Online. Dr. A Online is the YouTube channel. And we'll put that over here, especially if you want the video version of these little talks. So to wrap it up, because we're winding out of time very, very quickly here and we've got to move on to the next program, Photodynamic therapy is the use of light. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy is use of pressure and oxygen. IV nutrient therapy is literally putting nutrients in the vein. Again, all these are very medical and require healthcare providers. And then what we talked about just now, heat and thermal therapies are heating your body up. As always, this is not medical advice. This is global information. You go to a healthcare provider to get appropriately screened for any of these things. make sure you find a provider who does it. And also in our show notes, I'm gonna put in some referral links to different provider groups that may be helpful for you to find kind of outside of your standard primary care system. But that's about all of our time for today. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. This is Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, and we are here every Thursday on CTR Radio Network. And then we put this over to all the pod burners and then over to YouTube as well. Been my pleasure speaking with you, and I will see you all on the radio or a podcast next week.