Fighting cancer with fever
25th Nov 2005, 01:56 GMT
Filed under: Alternative Therapies I'm in the middle of reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, in which one of the characters is miraculously cured of syphilitic dementia by running a high fever for a few days. All my skeptical hackles immediately went up, and I turned to Google. I found that, indeed, inducing high fevers was a moderately successful, albeit dangerous, treatment for syphilis before the advent of antibiotics. A little more poking around revealed that Dr. William Coley, a nineteenth-century advocate of fever therapy, had some success with using high fever to treat advanced forms of cancer. Quackery, you say? This researcher doesn't think so...One wonders (well, I wonder, anyway) if we'd see more studies in PubMed on the efficacy of Dr. Coley's therapy if it were possible for a drug company to make money off it. Read Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
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