A Possible Explanation for Cold Intolerance or Low Body Temperature in Liposarcoma Patients

The article I published yesterday, "Most Liposarcoma Patients Have Cold Intolerance or (note: should read 'or') Low Body Temperature", drew the attention of some liposarcoma and other sarcoma patients and their families. Some patients and families sent me more information, and I discussed the issue with several liposarcoma patients. Through this feedback and discussion I found that the phenomenon is indeed universal, which prompted me to think about the principle behind it.

Here I venture a hypothesis: it is precisely because something has gone wrong inside the bodies of liposarcoma (and possibly other tumor) patients that the body's perception of ambient temperature is distorted; these patients' bodies then activate some mechanism to store more fat against the cold, resulting in excessive proliferation and mutation of fat cells and the production of liposarcoma.

So the key to treating liposarcoma may lie in correcting the patient's distorted perception of external temperature. Once the patient no longer feels cold or the basal temperature rises, fat cells will stop mutating and over-proliferating. Liposarcoma growth will slow or even stop; existing liposarcoma may shrink; and the patient's life will be safeguarded.

Of course this is only an untested hypothesis, but I think we may well "boldly hypothesize and carefully verify" on this question. At present there is no especially good treatment for liposarcoma, and most patients relapse frequently after surgery. Medical science still has many gaps in the pathology of liposarcoma; postoperative internal-medicine response rates are low, and breakthrough directions are needed.

Liposarcoma is a malignancy seen mainly in adults. Although children can get it, pediatric liposarcoma is extremely rare. This is because human fat cells are already proliferating heavily in early childhood, peak at puberty, and thereafter their number generally no longer increases. So in childhood, fat-cell proliferation is a normal physiological phenomenon; in adulthood, if fat cells still proliferate uncontrollably, disease results. Fundamentally, human liposarcoma is the result of fat cells that cannot stop proliferating.

One major function of fat is insulation. We all know from life that in cold winter we eat more, prefer meat, and gain weight. This is because we need more calories in winter to keep warm, so the body stores more fat.

The great majority of liposarcoma patients I have recently asked tend toward cold intolerance; some say they have suffered severe cold intolerance since childhood, and that in winter and early spring they always feel bone-deep cold. Even patients living in the warm climates of Guangdong and Guangxi feel this way. And a Hunan patient I am treating, after his cold intolerance clearly improved, his tumor also stopped growing, and the low-back pain caused by tumor pressure disappeared.

But if one follows TCM and judges these patients as yang-deficient and treats them with a yang-supporting approach, the opposite happens. Yesterday a sarcoma patient's family told me that a TCM physician they saw prescribed 60 g of aconite per day in the decoction, yet it did nothing to improve the patient's cold constitution. When I treated the Hunan liposarcoma patient, I used large doses of Shandougen (Sophora Tonkinensis), Mudanpi (Moutan), Baitouweng (Pulsatilla), Chishao (Red Peony), Xuanshen (Scrophularia), Jinyinhua (Honeysuckle), Zihu Diding (Viola), Banzhilian (Scutellaria Barbata), Baihuasheshecao (Oldenlandia), Shishangbai (Selaginella), Sheliugu (Amorphophallus), Sangbaipi (Morus Bark), and other cooling heat-clearing and detoxifying herbs that TCM traditionally considers cold in nature. After taking them the patient no longer felt cold, even sweated quite a bit, and his basal temperature rose. So the reason behind these patients' cold intolerance cannot be explained by TCM yang-deficiency theory.

Two liposarcoma patients reported other similar symptoms: although they felt bone-deep cold for a long time, they could not eat any hot food—eating hot food immediately produced "shanghuo" symptoms, and they had chronic mouth ulcers. In TCM terms this may be a "true heat, false cold" constitution; from a modern-medicine standpoint, one of the greatest harms of excess fat accumulation is inflammation. On the other hand, inflammation itself may be the internal cause of the body's distorted perception of external temperature, so excessive proliferation/mutation of fat cells and inflammation may form a mutually reinforcing vicious cycle. This may also explain why TCM heat-clearing/detoxifying and blood-cooling/swelling-reducing herbs work on liposarcoma: most of these herbs are both anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor.

Generally speaking, Western medicine does not pay attention to these symptoms in liposarcoma patients. I have read a large number of inpatient records of liposarcoma patients and have seen few doctors record such symptoms. Modern Western medicine relies too heavily on diagnostic equipment and neglects the patient's chief complaint. TCM diagnoses by the principle of "knowing the pathogen from the manifestation," searching for the cause in the patient's reported symptoms—this is TCM's strength. TCM's weakness is that it cannot observe and study disease as precisely and finely as modern medicine. If TCM and Western medicine learn from each other, both following biology's scientific principles of observation and experiment, we may diagnose disease and find causes better and find solutions for patients.

I will research liposarcoma further along this line, but until the hypothesis I have proposed is fully verified, I do not advise anyone to treat it as truth, and I will not do so myself. Scientific research may freely "take things for granted," but what matters more is verifying the reasonableness of those assumptions through large numbers of repeatable experiments.