Malignant fluid, a commonly seen tumor associated complication, mainly includes peritoneal effusion, malignant pleural effusion and pericardial effusion. It can produce huge negative influence on the quality of life of patients and even lead to death. Treatment of malignant effusion is one of the effective measures for improving life expectancy of patients. To evaluate the effect of thermotherapy in combination with intracavitary infusion of Kangai injection in treating malignant pleural effusion, 195 patients who received treatment from April 2010 to October 2014 in the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University were selected and divided into an observation group and two control groups (group A and B). The observation group was treated by thermotherapy in combination with intracavitary infusion of kangai injection. Control group A was treated by intracavitary infusion of kangai injection and control group B was treated by hyperthermal perfusion in combination with intracavity chemotherapy. Clinical effects, quality of life, treatment safety and untoward reactions were compared between the groups. It was found that differences of WBC, RBC and PLT levels before and after treatment had no statistical significance comparisons within group and comparisons between groups (P>0.05); hepatic and renal functions of the groups had no remarkable difference before or after treatment (P>0.05). The clinical effect of the observation group was superior to that of control groups A and B (P less than 0.05); the Karnofsky performance status (KPS) score of the observation group was much higher than that of control groups A and B (79.34±10.58 vs 71.11±9.64), but the difference of the ZPS score between groups had no statistical significance (P>0.05). It can be concluded that thermotherapy in combination with intracavitary infusion of traditional Chinese medicine can be safely applied as it has positive effects and remarkably improves quality of life, therefore it is clinically worth promoting.