Greek doctors in the 5th Century BC already used heat and fever treatments to cure various disease states long before the modern medicine had profound knowledge about the causes and the treatment of various chronic diseases. Thus the name of hyperthermia originates from the old Greek and means "treatment with overheating".

In the treatment with overheating (hyperthermia) used today, a diseased organ or tissue is overheated and thus a special treatment applied. It's been more than 15 years that hyperthermia is utilized more and more frequenctly to the treatment of most chronic diseases, either by itself or in combination with other therapy procedures, such as radiotherapy or chemotherapy. In many audited studies, hyperthermia could give a proof of its clinical effectiveness. It had thus become a major aspect of modern medicine