Most Liposarcoma Patients Feel Cold Intolerance or a Low Baseline Body Temperature
Liposarcoma is a common soft-tissue sarcoma in adults and is not the same as an ordinary lipoma. Liposarcoma is a hard-to-treat malignant tumor; its prognosis depends on its location. If it grows where it can be radically excised, the prognosis after surgery is good. But most liposarcomas are deep-seated, hard to radically resect, and prone to recurrence.
The effects of both TCM and Western internal medicine on liposarcoma are not optimistic; the response rates of Chinese herbs, chemotherapy, immunotherapy and targeted therapy are all low. Liposarcoma patients relapse extremely easily, some relapsing within a month after surgery. Moreover, on recurrence the tumor grows rapidly; after re-operation it recurs even faster than before, and internal-medicine control lasts only a short time. It is therefore a rather intractable malignancy, and many patients undergo repeated surgeries until surgery is no longer possible and they die.
When I treated a liposarcoma patient surnamed Shi from Huaihua, Hunan, I unexpectedly found that after recent oral TCM treatment his basal body temperature rose, his cold intolerance clearly improved, the low back pain previously caused by tumor pressure clearly improved, and the tumor was well controlled. He is a very meticulous patient; his recorded basal temperatures show an increase of about 0.5°C. A year ago his hands and feet were ice-cold and in winter he always felt bone-deep cold; after the tumor was controlled, his temperature rose and he no longer felt cold.
Because I have treated and seen many liposarcoma patients, I am in a position to conduct some surveys. Before writing this article I asked 12 liposarcoma patients; 11 reported obvious cold intolerance or low body temperature, and only one reported no obvious cold intolerance (but this patient had not continuously monitored temperature data). One patient said that when chemotherapy was effective, his temperature rose in parallel.
Whether this phenomenon is universal requires more statistics and studies in liposarcoma populations—I will conduct more detailed statistics in my future practice. Liposarcoma, unlike other tumors, has no obvious tumor marker, so it is hard to assess whether a regimen is effective. If temperature rise and improvement in cold intolerance truly correlate with disease control, we will have quantifiable physical signs to guide treatment, and TCM internal-medicine treatment of liposarcoma can be more targeted.
Incidentally, this liposarcoma patient, Shi, did not experience the temperature rise after taking TCM yang-supporting herbs. I treated him for two years; during that time he also took aconite-containing formulas without effect. When I used dampness-draining, swelling-reducing herbs, the tumor even enlarged—though the growth trend had previously been controlled. What truly raised his temperature was large-dose heat-clearing, detoxifying, blood-cooling, swelling-reducing herbs; after taking them his temperature rose immediately. When I applied this regimen to another ovarian cancer patient, fever also appeared immediately. Their formulas contained neither yang-supporting herbs nor diaphoretic exterior-releasing herbs; they were basically all large doses of heat-clearing, detoxifying and blood-cooling, swelling-reducing herbs. Why temperature rises after taking them is puzzling.
According to traditional TCM theory, heat-clearing/detoxifying and blood-cooling/swelling-reducing herbs are cooling in nature and should not be taken by patients with a cold-deficient constitution. Yet after Shi took them, he felt more warmed than he did on warming yang aconite formulas. Another liposarcoma patient I treated, Qiu, used large doses of warming-yang herbs under a TCM physician in Tianjin without any temperature rise, and the treatment was ineffective. The reasoning here is hard to explain by traditional TCM theory.
Shi is a tumor-bearing survivor; because the tumor recurred after two surgeries and he lost the chance for further surgery, I have treated him continuously since March 15, 2019, and he has received no other TCM or Western treatment during these two years. The effect of his pure TCM treatment can therefore be studied as a typical case. I will continue to observe him; if after six months or a year the tumor has further shrunk greatly or even disappeared completely, I will publish the complete case for reference by other physicians studying liposarcoma and by liposarcoma patients.