Eventually, many patients reach a point of frustration. In 2010, Tommy Farnsworth, now 32 years old, started to experience symptoms like numbness on the entire right side of his body. He went to see a doctor and tested positive for Lyme along with several tick-borne co-infections like Babesia, so they put him on a round of doxycycline antibiotics.

“I went on with my life and continued working, but then started to develop strange, severe pain in my back and leg fatigue. I went to the ER [for the back pain] and they said there was nothing wrong with me. They tested me for MS, and did brain scans, and autonomic testing. Nothing,” he remembers.

Eventually Farnsworth saw another doctor who diagnosed him with post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. He took another dose of doxycycline as well as a few rounds of other antibiotics, but again Farnsworth says he wasn’t getting any better. (It’s worth noting that the CDC does not support the use of long-term antibiotics to treat persistent Lyme. In a statement on their website, the agency writes that there is no evidence to show that the use of long-term antibiotics will have any better effect than a placebo for patients in this situation. They also note that the antibiotics themselves can cause serious health complications.)

“Next I went on herbal protocols, which cleared my brain fog. Then I got an MRI and it showed that I had demyelination in my brain from Lyme or mold or maybe PTSD. I had brain damage,” he says. “To me, this was a sign that I needed to do something drastic.”

Farnsworth first heard about Klinik St. Georg when he went to see a doctor at the Dean Center for Tick Borne Illness at Spaulding Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. Clinics like St. Georg have popped up all over the world to offer chronic illness patients like Farnsworth an alternative route to a better life, typically providing therapies involving western medicine, alternative medicine, and lifestyle changes.

The patients are sedated, often all at the same time, then the medical professionals use infrared technology to heat the room and the patients’ bodies to 106.4 degrees.

Farnsworth’s doctor encouraged him to look into one of Klinik St. Georg’s most popular alternative therapies: Hyperthermia. Hyperthermia isn’t a new treatment in the medical world. In the U.S., the procedure is FDA-approved for cancer treatment when used in combination with radiation therapy. At Dana Farber, researchers are currently in clinical trials with a protocol that will use hyperthermia and high energy X-rays to damage tumor cells. There’s also talk of eventually using hyperthermia to treat mental health issues, like depression. But because research is still in its early stages, hyperthermia is generally considered an alternative treatment that is neither covered by insurance nor recommended by most of the medical community.

The science of hyperthermia is fairly simple: When your body spikes a fever, it’s because it is trying to fight an infection. Heat kills bacteria, and according to Dr. Friedrich Douwes, the lead doctor at Klinik St. Georg, this makes it an especially effective treatment for eradicating the kind of Lyme bacteria that don’t seem to want to die.

“Conventional medicine cannot eradicate the Lyme bacteria because they stay in the ligaments of the body and antibiotics don’t reach them,” Douwes says. “Instead of getting better, people get worse because of the side effects of the antibiotics, which can cause the destruction of the gastrointestinal tract and the microbiome.”

During a hyperthermia treatment, a patient’s body is typically brought up to a temperature of 106.4 degrees Fahrenheit and kept there for a long time, often up to six hours, to kill any bacteria or viruses that might be hiding out.

But there are catches: When done incorrectly, hyperthermia can be very dangerous, since the human body is not built to stay at that high temperature for a sustained period of time. While some patients may respond well to the treatment, others may not be able to handle it physically. (Douwes compares the treatment to running a marathon.) And because the procedure is not regulated as a treatment for Lyme, and thus hasn’t been tested extensively in the context of post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome patients, medical providers still don’t know where to place the guardrails.

Like many of his colleagues, Cameron doesn’t recommend hyperthermia — or any other alternative Lyme treatment, for that matter. He sticks to treating his patients with a traditional variety of antibiotics, which he says works for most people, most of the time. (Again, this method isn’t endorsed by the CDC, but the CDC doesn’t make any recommendations for other treatment alternatives, either.) Cameron also says he is generally supportive when a patient wants to seek out alternative care from other care providers and integrative clinics, especially if they’re not seeing improvements through the more traditional routes.