A small town in Germany

With a big cancer therapeutic clinic

Duderstadt is a town in southern Niedersachsen, Germany, near the famous university town of Göttingen.

It is the capital of the northern part of the Eichsfeld which used to be the private estate of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Mainz. It is located on the Deutsche Fachwerkstraße (German Timber-Frame Road).

Cities and towns with examples of the vernacular timber-framed houses are situated along the 3,000 km (1,864 mile) tourist route.

Duderstadt’s Rathaus (author’s picture). The historic town hall is one of the oldest and most beautiful in Germany, dating from 1302. It served as a marketplace for traders and was the centre of bourgeois life. It had a torture chamber for convicted criminals and you can just see the pillory post to the left of the flagstaffs. The penalty for letting your cattle stray onto a neighbour’s pasture was an hour on the pillory.

We’re not here for the scenery, pleasant as it is. We have beaten a path to a famous cancer treatment clinic, Praxisgemeinschaft für Zelltherapie. They use a very particular form of dendritic cell therapy which is not available in the UK.

Their success rate is amazing but the principal, Dr Thomas Neßelhut, has been treated as a crank, until his results were difficult to deny. Still, the big pharmaceutical companies fear him. He does not treat cancer with their expensive chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs.

My partner, Lisa Attias, has Stage 4 melanoma. She has tried mainstream treatment, including immunotherapy and a novel drug trial. If anything, these treatments have made her condition worse. Dendritic cell therapy is very effective with melanoma and prostrate cancer, in particular.

The treatment programme will cost us £30,000 in practice fees and travel costs. We will contribute as much as we can but we will fall considerably short.

All Dr Neßelhut’s melanoma patients are still alive, proof that we are not wasting money.

Lisa has a JustGiving page to help us raise funds. I appreciate that not everyone is in a position to contribute financially. Just sharing this blog on social media would help immensely. Another family using this therapy raised £40,000 consisting of hundreds of small contributions of under £50.