Interviewer: Your hospital specializes in treating cancer. What are some of the more common therapies that you employ there?
Rodrigo Rodriguez, MD: Well, having said what I have already said, our first bottom line situation is to see that the patient is well fed, and by fed, I don't mean that you ate well. I mean that you have what you need to work.
Fighting cancer is a war. Now when you think of a war, many times you think of the obvious things. You think of the bombs, of the tanks, of the soldiers, etcetera. But there's a lot behind that that we don't see, that we never talk about. All those tanks, airplanes, everything, need lots of fuel to work. Those soldiers have to be fed, they have to take a shower, they need a hospital behind them. There are a lot of supplies that go behind them, so when you are fighting a cancer you need all that in order to be successful.
So one of the things that we and cancer patients will do very frequently is to place what's called a central catheter. In other words, we need an intravenous access that's going to allow us to give vitamins and minerals and energy and proteins and essential fatty acids, to give full nutrition so that the body gets today what it has to get today. I don't have the time to fight with you and say please, and I see that everyday with patients. "Please Daddy, don't you chew a little bit of this, come on, have a little bit of juice."
Cancer patients not only do not have a good appetite, and many times for them food is repulsive, so one of the things that surprises our patients is when they come in here and say, "I'm not hungry," I say, "Don't worry, don't eat." And the family says, "What do you mean?" No, I'm going to put everything in a bag, I'm going to feed them, and sure enough, two or three days after you see these people functioning again. Why? Because the body is getting energy. The body is getting nutrients, the body is doing a lot better, and then they get the drive and the energy to function again. But that not only is that anemic, it's not that they just feel better because it's not cocaine, but it is actually a fact that now the bodies are doing a lot more for themselves.
Then you have the opportunity to, we draw blood, for example, from patients. We separate white blood cells, we separate dendritic cells, we separate stem cells. All of these things platdlet-rich plasma, all of these things that have a lot of healing capacity. So we prefer concentrates of one thing or the other, or dendritics or white blood cells or stem cells to restore, and we give them back in a transfusion. When we take them out we separate them, we concentrate them, we feed them, we put them in a nutritional environment, and then we put them back in the body to help the body recover that surveillance, that neurological performance.
And the other thing is head on anti-cancer therapies that are not going to damage the structure of the body. I don't want to damage. I don't want to do what chemotherapy is doing. I want to do the opposite. So one of them is hyperthermia. Temperature has been recognized since the dawn of humanity as a way to treat diseases. Why? Because it just makes common sense.
Just think that every time you get sick you get a fever. Well, fever is not a condemnation, it's not a bad thing, it's a mechanism of defense. Every time you have fever your body is trying to heal you. It's trying to do something. So don't mess with a fever. I always tell patients, if you have fever, go to bed, drink a lot of water, rest. For goodness sakes don't take a tylenol, because you are blocking what your body is trying to do.
So what you do, for example, with your fever, is as the temperature goes up the speed of reactions in the body goes up. So a lot of enzymes, a lot of the activity of white blood cells goes up, so you have more aggressive white blood cells, you have better enzymes, you have better ways to fight these cancer cells. That's for one. But on the other one, cancer cells are very sensitive to heat. They don't adjust well to it, okay.
So Egyptians, for example, used to bury patients in sand in the desert for certain time in order to raise the temperature to kill some diseases. 1937 Nobel Prize went to a guy that discovered that if he gave malaria to patients so they could develop these huge fevers, he could kill syphilis.
Just the mere fact that you brought up the temperature, with today's technology I can recirculate your blood in the same way that you recirculate water in a swimming pool and use a heat exchange device. So I'm warming up your blood and getting it back into your body so the temperature of your body, just as a swimming pool, is going to go up and up, and I can get it to 107 degrees. What's 107 degrees? That will be exactly the type of temperature you get if you get malaria. But in this case I have it under total control. And I keep it for two hours of treatment, two hours I bring it down. What happened during those two hours? Number one, I killed a lot of cancer cells. Number one, I damaged a lot of cancer cells. Those that were not killed have been damaged. So whatever therapies we are going to do to follow are going to be much more successful in better ways. Even with chemotherapy, even with radiation therapy, when we apply heat to a cancer and then people are given either chemo or radiation, they get better results. Why it's not done more frequently, it's beyond my understanding, but it works, and there are tons of literature that shows it.
The other thing that happens is, we have had patients that were on a successful chemotherapy program because chemotherapy is not great, it's not the answer, definitely, but in some people it works. But what could be more frustrating than to have a cancer have a good response to the drug, and you are doing fine and all of a sudden the cancer starts growing again because the cancer is not sensitive to the drug anymore.
And you can see the dismay of these people. "I was doing so well, and now this doesn't work anymore." You do hyperthermia and the tumor becomes sensitive again to the same drug that was doing well before the treatment. So hyperthermia, to me, is one of the major breakthroughs. I'm sure you are going to be hearing more and more about it, and the only reason why it's not more prevalent is because it's not connected to any pharmaceutical company. Otherwise, I think it's major tool that you could use in any hospital today and have a much better success.
So there are many things in alternatives that are out there for us to use, that we are not using for I don't know what reason.