I have just returned from a two-week tour of German cancer clinics that use various forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). My wife and I logged almost 2,000 miles on the Autobahn, visited a dozen clinics and attended two medical meetings. Remember that the word "Klinik" in German can refer to either an inpatient or outpatient facility. Some of the "Kliniks" we visited in Germany had up to 150 beds, making them small private hospitals, rather than "clinics" in the American sense.

In general, the trip went very smoothly. I hope to write up the medical aspects of the tour shortly for our Where To Go? series. If you will indulge me, however, I would now like to make some broader observations about our latest visit to Germany.

We began, as planned, with a visit to the inpatient facility of Dr. Alexander Herzog in the state of Hessen. I remember when Dr. Herzog's clinic was called the Benediktusquelle, and was located between the towns of Selters and Ortenberg. He has relocated just 15 kilometers to the north in the charming town of Bad Salzhausen, near the small city of Nidda. This peaceful location is in a German spa town famous for its salt water baths. My wife and I were amazed that Bad Salzhausen, a town of just a few thousand people, has a huge park and arboretum worthy of a city many times its size. All the trees are carefully labeled in both Latin and German, and some specimens date back 200 years or more!

NOTE: There are two dozen pictures from our trip located on the photo sharing Web site Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24860924@N07/

The park is also filled with sculpture and other modern art works by local inhabitants. Strolling in the arboretum at dawn, breathing in the fresh air, watching an unfamiliar (to me) assortment of birds hopping among the branches - I could see why Dr. Herzog had chosen this as the setting for his clinic.

Our next stop was in Bad Mergentheim, a town in the German state of Baden-Württenberg, at which I have spent a good deal of time over the years. We were there to visit the Hufeland Clinic. This was my first visit since the July 2006 death of Wolfgang Woeppel, MD, founding director of the clinic. Mrs. Gabriel Woeppel, her daughter Sonja, and the new medical director, Andreas Demuth, MD, have made an admirable effort to keep the clinic afloat in the difficult times following its founder's demise.

The day that I visited also happened to be my birthday. To celebrate, my wife and I drove seven miles or so to the tiny village of Stuppach. At the local church (the Pfarrekirche Maria Himmelfarht) we paid a few Euros to an attendant who then opened a side chapel for us. There we found, as always, one of my favorite paintings in the world - the Stuppacher Madonna by Matthias Grünewald. The painting dates from 1514-1516 and has been on this site since the 1920s. German painting tends to be dark in every sense, yet this painting is filled with an almost mystical joy and light. (See the illustration at Flickr.)

We spent that day with a client of ours, an American patient, Amy T., who was being treated at Hufeland. We sat in the twilight, listening to the bells, and drinking beer at an outdoor café in the town square. (It doesn't get much more German than that!) The next morning we drove our little rented Mercedes back up north to the city of Aschaffenburg. Having a few hours to kill, we toured the cathedral museum (its historical artifacts date back to the Stone Age) and waited - again at an outdoor cafe - for the arrival of our next interviewee, Dr. Arno Thaller.

Dr. Thaller had taken the express train from his home in Bavaria and showed up at around 4 pm. I interviewed him for an hour, mostly about his use of the Newcastle disease virus (NDV) vaccine. We then went together into an Aschaffenburg hotel for a meeting of the Dendritic Cell Working Group. I considered it a great honor to be invited to attend this group, which is made up of some of the leading lights of immunotherapy in Germany. There were a total of about 25 participants and, in deference to me, they held the meeting in English. (I appreciated this, although I find that my comprehension of scientific German improves a little bit with each visit). Participants came from all over the Western half of Germany to exchange scientific ideas on how best to treat cancer immunologically. It was a fascinating meeting, made possible by the relative smallness of Germany as well as by its superb intercity railway system.

Late that night we drove with Dr. Thaller back to his home in Markt Berolzheim. This trip was difficult, as our Garmin Nuvi GPS, generally a lifesaver, at one point deposited us at a road block in the middle of a field in central Bavaria! As exhausted as we were, we had a good laugh and found our way back to the main road. The late night conversation revolved around some obscure questions of German idealistic philosophy. (Dr. Thaller, in his youth, had studied with a student of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger). At one point in this heated discussion I offered to drive our rented Mercedes into a ditch to prove the existence of the objective world. Luckily, Dr. Thaller declined to take me up on the offer. When we got to his house in the wee hours of the morning I was awakened by the strains of Moonlight Sonata. Dr. Thaller, his son later informed me, never goes to bed without playing Beethoven or Bach on his giant Büsendorfer piano.

The next morning, Thursday, we reluctantly parted from our charming host and drove to Munich Airport to pick up my sister-in-law, Robin, who was flying in from her home in Dublin, Ireland. We spent the next three days in her company, which was especially nice for my wife, who gets to see her youngest sister too rarely. We then drove down to Prien-am-Chiemsee, where I immediately went to see my old friend, M. Rigdon Lentz, MD. Some readers may know that I first wrote about Dr. Lentz's work in my Cancer Chronicles newsletter in 1994.

To read that earlier article, please see:
http://www.ralphmoss.com/troph.html

Dr. Lentz is presently working at the Frauenklinik, in this charming lakeside town in southern Bavaria. That afternoon he gave a fascinating Power Point presentation on his work. In the evening we had a dinner with his wife, Kiran, also a medical doctor, and three of his American patients. It was a memorable event.

To be concluded next week.

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.