The reason Dr Douwes researched these alternative therapies was because he was dissatisfied with the outcomes he saw with conventional cancer treatment. He felt there must be more that could be done for cancer patients. At this time, conventional medicine gave people with cancer a 35% chance of survival. So Dr Douwes developed his own philosophy of integrative holistic medicine and even today, some hospitals, including the Veramed Hospitals in Brannenburg and Biomed Klinik in Bergzabern in 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.
To treat his cancer patients he used some conventional and some unconventional therapies and he has continued to do this for 40 years with a great deal of success. Here is an excerpt from a book called: New Paradigms in Lyme Disease Treatment: 10 Top Doctors Reveal Healing Strategies that Work, where Dr Douwes talks about how he discovered whole body hyperthermia was effective for eradicating Lyme disease. To learn more about the book and to read more about Dr. Douwes’ treatment approach, see:
www.NewLymeTreatments.com.
Excerpt from Dr Douwes: 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 body’s 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 patient’s 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 symptoms—were 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.
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 patient’s body temperature to 41.6°, the medication’s 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 husband’s 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.