[extropy-chat] My fever theory for longevity

[Mike Lorrey]

I've been recently working on an article for Neal Stephenson's Metaweb
(http://www.metaweb.com) regarding a character who is infected with
stage 3 neurosyphilis, but contracts a sickness that causes a high
fever that apparently kills the syphilis spirochete. Neal based this on
a 19th century maritime anecdote he read, but it turns out that 'fever
therapy' through inducing a mild curable form of malaria to cure
syphilis has been in practice since the late 18th and early 19th
centuries up until 1940 when penicillin was introduced.

It turns out that induced fevers using hot baths are now used,
pioneered by a doctor named Issels, in conjunction with chemotherapy,
to reduce the required dosage of drugs to a third to a half of normal
dosages. 

This led me to propose a theory, bringing in Robin Hanson's work
demonstrating little benefit from health care, that vaccines for
non-fatal or non-curable diseases, diseases which trigger high fevers,
could cause people to be at higher risk of cancer.

If fever therapy weakens well developed tumors enough to improve
chemotherapy performance, it follows that nascent cancerous cells or
early tumors could be destroyed entirely by high fevers alone, and
fever-inducing illness like flus, mono, etc. may explain many cases of
mysterious remissions that doctors cannot explain otherwise.

If fever plays such a role naturally in reducing one's risk of cancer,
this may be detectable in medical statistics. If it holds up, it may
also explain why modern health care does not contribute measurably to
longevity: the diseases you are protected from by vaccines may not kill
you, but the cancers those disease fevers may otherwise destroy will,
so they balance each other out.

There is another datapoint to this: compare national longevity to
national prevalence of practices of taking long hot baths, spas, hot
springs, and such which would raise body temps above 102 deg F.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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