[****oops - sorry. I reread your original post and saw that you were looking for information about a specific clinic in Cologne. Sorry, I didn't go there. Below is info about other German clinics. To evaluate yours, as a suggestion, you could research what type of dendritic cell therapy they offer, look at US clinical trials and see if their angle might also be on trial, and research whether the doctors at the clinics have published anything in legitimate journals or have presented findings at the big conferences. ASCO is for medical oncology, and SITC is the immunotherapy society. ]
Hi. I went to a different German clinic - the one in Duderstadt, Germany ran by father and son Drs. Nesselhut
http://www.immune-therapy.net/en/These people are legitimate, and have presented papers at ASCO (link to one below)
http://meeting.ascopubs.org/cgi/content ... suppl/3065I did the dendritic cell (DC) therapy in 2013 and it kind of worked, til it didn't. I had mixed results, some shrinkage, some growth. All in all I don't regret the experience and didn't have to pay anywhere close to $80k. As an American, I went for the cell harvesting in Germany, but received the monthly shots in NYC which was a lot cheaper. I don't regret doing this, and maybe it extended my life. I researched the clinic and treatment as much as I could prior to making a commitment. I am not a doctor or a scientist, so much of the scholarly/scientific information on the 'net was way over my head, but at least there was some. There was a lot of promising literature about dendritic cell treatment, and a bit about the Nesselhuts' work. Also, I found many clinical trials for DC treatments so figured this couldn't be completely bunk. And I read individuals' blogs for Nesselhut patients, and while some were thriving, many of the people who sought this treatment had died while on it, or shortly afterwards. This was not encouraging but good feedback for me to make an informed choice.
I mostly post on the CSN board - I have lurked here for many years - and there was a guy on CSN who did go to Hallwang, which is what most other people on this thread were talking about I think. Hallwang is apparently pushed by a medical tourism company in Australia called Grace Gawler. This guy on CSN, an Australian, was talking about Hallwang treatments using an EU approved drug (off label for MCRC) called removab, I researched removab, talked to my onc, and even sent info about it to a friend of a friend who is a pharmaceutical industry consultant, checked the clinical trials (US) database for anything in the queue on it, and found next to nothing. There is no chatter about it. I believe that "a good product sells". If it really was a wonder drug for MCRC, there would be chatter. Nope. Crickets. So I'd heard of rich people/the 1% getting treated with off-label cocktails of all kinds of drugs, even in the US, and I figured this was one of those deals. Mmmm. Unregulated medical treatment for rich people with deep pockets? Not for me. Without data proving its effectiveness, I really didn't want to take a chance on it. Removab is supposedly like avastin, a monoclonal antibody, but removab is a tricloncal antibody, or something (like I said, I don't understand the science.) I got twelve hits of avastin. So one hit of removab is supposed to cure me?? I didn't think so, and I couldn't afford twelve hits of an off-label drug out of pocket anyway.
Somebody else got TACE in their liver at a clinic in frankfurt , Germany (not Hallwang). That sounded awful. The Dr who performed this, Dr. Thomas Vogl, might be a somebody in the cancer world. I don't know. I didn't research this because it sounded terrible and I would never do it.
I don't think all German private clinics are dodgy, though. My godfather was German, and got cancer in his 80s/90s and went to a different private German clinic. I forgot the name of it, and can't find the brochure. But I think he went for the wacky palliative care that we don't really do in the US, like mineral baths and oxygen treatments. He was a smart guy so I doubt his clinic was dodgy, but at like 90 he didn't have much of a chance anyway. He got some comfortable treatment for his symptoms and just died. When he and my godmother were younger and healthier, they took me to Baden something to the mineral baths (one locker room for both sexes! NOT American, definitely not) and we soaked in and drank the nasty tasting water. The coolest therapy they had was water spilling over a huge pile of twigs and patients wanting really fresh air were supposed to breathe the mist coming off of the twigs. That was so cool. I tried it and it really was good air and cleared my head. So some of those clinics do those sorts of things. If I remember from the brochure and what his daughter told me, his clinic had a mix of traditional medicine and palliative treatments.
hope this helps
Karin