In Defense of Sweating

I get a lot of calls from people from all over the world; some seek information about holistic therapies; some call just to share their experiences with healing. This week I received a most fascinating call from a woman named Shirley Mitchell Williams. She called wanting to know more about La Casa’s ozone steam cabinet. Shirley told me that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that had mestaticized throughout her body: into her bones, organs and lymph glands.She saw various doctors: the first suggested a double mastectomy; the next wanted to do that plus chemo; the third doc wanted to do both of those plus radiation. The fourth doctor she saw told her that she had 90 days to live, that none of those treatments would help her, and that she should go home and put her affairs in order. She did go home: but she decided to not put her affairs in order (having spoken to her, I would conclude that  her emotional and spiritual affairs were already in order). She decided to pray and fast. On the third day, she felt the presence of Jesus, and she started sweating. She understood her sweating as a message, and she began a practice of sweating with a vengeance. Three times a day, she took herself into a hot sauna. We are now three years later, and Shirley is cancer-free, telling her remarkable story of healing. (She has a book,  Stage 4 Cancer Gone.)

I get my daily sweat-fix by doing yoga in a hot room. These days I take Prana Yoga, which is a heated room to about 100 degrees. (There’s a Prana studio in the neighborhood of La Casa, as well as in Brooklyn.) But 15 years or so ago, I started with Bikram, whose room is heated to 104 degrees.

Bikram calls the room a “torture chamber,” but defends the practice by saying a warm body is a flexible body. He doesn’t talk specifically about detoxification, but I do remember when I was doing Bikram that the teacher would quote him saying that taking his classes gives you a mini-heart attack now in order to prevent the big heart attack later. I think the same can be said about sweating, which essentially constitutes the artificial induction of a fever.

Deceits of the Mind and Their Effects on the Body.)

Unfortunately, those of us living today have seriously compromised our bodies’ abilities to utilize the acute inflammation defense. Children are no longer getting the febrile afflictions that were common when I was growing up: measles, mumps, chicken pox. Those illnesses were crucial for the periodic exercising of our immune systems. They lasted a few days, and then we were romping around again with healthy bodies. Today, mono is more common for teenagers. My daughter, like many of her classmates, had a bout of mono last winter, and was down and out, with a high fever that morphed into a low-grade fever for three months.

When I was Ruth Sackman’s assistant at the Foundation for the Advancement of Cancer Therapies in the 1970’s, we put together a program with Dr. Donald Cole for whole-body hyperthermia. We worked with a hospital in Queens, and subjected cancer patients with large tumors to over five hours of an induced high fever–over 105 degrees (the temperature at which cancer cells begin to die).

Hyperthermia is being offered today in the US on an experimental basis, but only as a localized treatment, usually using radio waves to heat the tissue, and in conjunction with chemotherapy. The process of heating the tissue was described to one willing patient with breast cancer as being like “microwaving” her breast. Hmmm. Not something I would want to do. I believe the method we used with Dr. Cole is currently performed only in Germany. The clinics there do not use radio waves, and the treatment is not a localized therapy. The German clinics embrace the same concept that Ruth Sackman worked with–that cancer is a systemic disease, and, thus, the treatment should be systemic, as well.

Anthropological medicine (formulated by Rudolf Steiner) has researched the history of cancer patients, and found that they often show a history of not having had the usual childhood febrile diseases that can serve as life-long protection against cancer.

La Casa has two sweat “torture chambers.” We have a salt sauna, which is specifically good for the respiratory system. And we have the ozone steam (which Shirley had called about), that not only heats your body, opening up your pores, but then pumps in activated oxygen (ozone). Ozone kills every pathogen known to mankind, and it kills cancer cells upon contact. It is used in the medical practice of 70% of the physicians in Germany. As well, there are whole hospitals in Cuba and India devoted to ozone therapies. You may be wondering why these specific countries have embraced ozone–India and Cuba have in common that they are poor. Germany was essentially bankrupt after the war, and that is when ozone began to be used there. Oxygen is free. That’s the commonality. Poor countries look to nature for healing. Nature is free.