The body’s design is quite amazing. With advancements in medicine, doctors can use our existing strengths and combine them with specialized treatments to fight chronic illnesses like Lyme disease.
Body temperature is one of these functions that almost seems like it has superpowers. Body temperature can help pinpoint death’s time; it can help rat you out if you are telling a lie and can signal that you are aging. It’s true. Your body temperature lowers as you age, and when you tell a lie, it rises.
When it comes to fevers, having one is not always a bad thing. Bodies were designed so that fevers can fight off infections. Here’s how it works.
Fevers Fight Infections
When infection or harmful bacteria invade your body, you need something to combat it where it is hiding, usually in your blood cells.
When you have a fever, the rise in body temperature sends your immune cells into action. They travel along blood-vessel walls to attack the source of infection. When talking about Lyme disease, bacteria gets into your bloodstream and multiplies. It strengthens and attaches to the walls of blood vessels. It is so strong it can move against the flow of blood without being flushed out.
Therefore, it is imperative to allow immune cells to attack the bacteria inside the blood vessels. One way to do this is with a technique called Hyperthermia.
Fevers Triggers Immune System
Have you ever felt “under the weather”? You don’t feel bad enough to go to the doctor, but you don’t feel well enough to work. You have a slight fever, around 101 degrees. And you decide to rest in bed and treat your symptoms at home. After a couple of days of rest, you feel much better and ready to return to a healthy life.
You may not have realized it, but allowing your body to have a rise in temperature, even if it was slightly rising, gave your body permission to take out the problem. Your immune system was put on alert, and your T cells and B cells created anti-bodies. They attacked any unwanted microbes from spreading throughout your body.
Fever Starves Bacteria
Most bacteria need iron to survive. When you have a fever, your body goes into storage mode. Meaning, it takes the iron it knows you will need later to heal, and stores it so nothing else can get it. This means bacteria and viruses do not have access to iron. If they can’t get iron, they starve to death.
Fever starves bacteria and viruses in other ways too. For example, it makes you lose your appetite. Bacteria and viruses can feed on what we feed on. Sugars are the main culprit of increased inflammation in the body due to infections like Lyme Disease.
With a fever, you don’t feel like eating, and your disease does not get fed. Instead, it starves.
Lyme Specialists have figured out how to use all the benefits of fever in treatment for Lyme disease by using the Hyperthermia technique. So what does this mean exactly?
What is Hyperthermia Treatment?
Most bacteria and infections can only survive in a small range of temperatures. If your body temperature is higher than this range, the bacteria and virus will die.
With Hyperthermia, doctors do not wait around until you have a natural fever. They artificially induce a fever in your body to eliminate the bacteria in your bloodstream, helping you go back to living a disease-free lifestyle.
Do Not Try This At Home
With Hyperthermia, your doctor increases your core body temperature a little bit at a time. Research has shown that even a small increase in temperature, like from 1 to 4 degrees, helps wake up the immune system and send it into battle.
Hyperthermia is not something you can try on your own at home with a friend. A trained physician must medically supervise it.
Your doctor will monitor your vital signs during the process and can lower your temperature quickly if needed. He or she can increase the temperature if required also.
Process of Hyperthermia Treatment
Receiving Hyperthermia means you will be placed in a thermal chamber. Usually, your whole body rests in the chamber. Your doctor will increase your body’s temperature using infrared-A-irradiation.
Lyme disease bacteria strains are typically killed at a temperature of 106 degrees. This means your doctor will slowly increase your temperature until you reach 106 degrees.
Keep in mind, however, that “normal” body temperatures vary from person to person. Depending on your regular body temperature, you may not need to go as high as 106 degrees.
After your fever has had time to work, your doctor will gradually lower your body’s temperature down to where it is considered healthy for your body.
Hyperthermia and Lyme Disease
Hyperthermia has shown excellent results in treating Lyme disease. As you may already know, the bacteria reproduce into spirochete in the bloodstream. These spirochete form biofilms around them as a protectant. It’s almost impossible for antibiotics to penetrate the biofilms.
However, when paired with Hyperthermia, your body’s heat can break down the biofilms, allowing antibiotics to get through and destroy the spirochete. That’s amazing when you think about it.
High fevers also do something else amazing; it increases blood flow and oxygen to your organs and tissues. When this happens, your immune system functions better. It allows your body to aid in the battle against infections, and then aid in healing itself.
With Lyme disease, the best-case scenario is to restore your body so that it can fight off bacteria and viruses on its own. Hyperthermia treatment comes very close to producing this scenario.
Get Started With Hyperthermia Treatment
The first and most important step in adding Hyperthermia to Lyme’s treatment is to find the right doctor. If your doctor is licensed and certified in treating Lyme disease, provides inpatient and outpatient services, uses the Heckel machine, and offers whole-body hyperthermia treatments, you have found the right one.
Start your search for the doctor who can provide Hyperthermia to treat your Lyme disease today.