Cancer Decisions - Free Newsletter

MY VISIT TO GERMANY

When this newsletter reaches you, I will be on my way to Germany to meet and tour the clinics of some complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)-oriented German doctors. This is my eighth such trip; previous visits took place in 1997, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2004 and 2005. On most of those previous trips I combined my clinic visits with a speech in Baden-Baden at the German Society of Oncology (the DGO), of which I am an honorary member.

This year's trip will also involve several meetings (see below). But the main purpose is to update my knowledge of prominent German CAM-cancer doctors so that I can better assess the progress that has been made in the integrative treatment of cancer there. Information gathered on this trip will be incorporated into our new "Where to Go?" series, will be used to update our Moss Reports, and will also form the basis of an article I will be writing for the journal Integrative Cancer Therapies.

This trip actually begins in Philadelphia, where I will visit the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University. My purpose is to tour the clinic and interview Tom Monti, MD, the director of Myrna Brind. This will complete the present round of interviews that began last month for a forthcoming "Where to Go" report on CAM resources in the Greater Philadelphia area.

On the evening of Saturday, May 3^rd I will attend the 30^th anniversary gala of the Center for Advancement of Cancer Education (CACE) and receive an award.

The word 'clinic' - or 'Klinik' as it is written in German - is a bit misleading for English speakers. The German word can mean either an outpatient clinic or a private hospital of a type rarely seen in the US or UK. Most foreigners have little idea of how many "Kliniken" there are in Germany. According to a German Web site, www.klinik.de, Germany is home to 2,200 such facilities, with more than 500,000 beds, serving 17.5 million patients per year! Obviously, no one person - especially a foreigner who visits approximately once per year - can fully describe this huge phenomenon.

How then do I decide where to go? I limit myself to clinics that treat cancer with CAM methods, are set up to receive foreigners and (generally) maintain an English as well as German language Web site. I also favor those clinics whose directors are active participants in the German Society of Oncology, of which I have been an honorary member for the past decade. This narrows the field considerably.

The day after the CACE Gala, I will fly to Frankfurt and begin the trip to Germany. My first stop will be the clinic of Alexander Herzog, MD, between the towns of Nidda and Bad Salzhausen. I will spend the night at the hospital, as I try to do while visiting foreign clinics. I do this not only to save on expenses - a necessity in this present economic downturn - but also to give me a more intimate understanding of what a stay would be like for patients.

From the Herzog Klinik I will drive to Bad Mergentheim for a visit with Andreas Demuth, MD, and Mrs. Gabriela Woeppel of the Hufeland Klinik. This will be my first visit to Hufeland since the death of its founder, Wolfgang Woeppel, MD, on July 10, 2006.

On the following day I will attend a meeting of the Dendritic Cell Working Group, held in Aschaffenburg. The other participants will be some of the German doctors and clinic directors who are using this most innovative form of immunotherapy. After that I will drive back to Markt Berolzheim with Arno Thaller, MD, who is one of the doctors whose work in this field has produced some intriguing results.

After that I will drive to Munich and then on to Prien am Chiemsee, where I will visit with an American-born expatriate physician, Rigdon Lentz, MD. He has continued and extended the interesting work on tumor blocking factors that he began in the US several decades ago. In the following days I will visit Friedrich Douwes, MD, at the St. Georg Klinik in Bad Aibling as well as Axel Weber, MD, at Klinik Marinus am Stein in Brannenburg. I also hope to visit Dr. Kopic at the Leonardis Klinik in Bad Heilbrunn.

When you get this far south you are almost in the Austrian Alps. So I will now reverse direction and head north. After a stopover in Nürnberg, I will visit Thomas Nesselhut, Dagmar Marx, and others at the Institute for Tumor Therapy in Duderstadt. I will then continue north to Cologne, where I will stay with my friends Lilly and Josef Beuth. Josef is a tenured professor of complementary medicine at the University of Cologne, one of the oldest and most famous universities in Europe (established 1388). I will also visit with Robert Gorter, MD, who in addition to his Cologne clinic is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. My final stop will be the little town of Bad Bergzabern, where I will visit the BioMed Clinic of H. Dieter Hager, MD.

I will have the honor of speaking at a meeting of the Society for Complementary Tumor Therapy and Natural Healing (Fördergesellschaft für komplementäre Tumortherapie und Naturheilverfahren). Some other participants, whom I hope to be able to meet and interview, are Drs. J.F. Peters of Duderstadt; F. Migeod of Bad Bergzabern; Gyorgyi Irmey of Heidelberg; as well as many others. Immediately after this meeting I will drive back to Frankfurt for the return trip.

In all, in two weeks I will visit and interview almost two dozen doctors and scientists. I expect to come back with a deeper knowledge and more comprehensive overview of the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Germany, a country with a deserved reputation for excellence in integrative cancer care.

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the help of Col. Lee Holmes and the Joan S. Holmes Foundation for support in making this investigatory trip.

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.

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CANCER DECISIONS© AND CURRENT TOPICS© REPORTS

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Coming shortly in this series: Radiation Therapy for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

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The news and other items in this newsletter are intended for informational purposes only. Nothing in this newsletter is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice.