When I was 19 years old, I happened to meet a large group of native American Indians at an NGO conference at the United Nations in Geneva fighting for their rights. There I was introduced to the sacred ceremony of the Indian sweat lodge.  This is far more than a sauna and I was deeply impressed by the power of the heat and how the Indians build that into their prayers.  And I felt a hidden secret right in that heat.

Years later as a medical student at the anthroposophical private University of Witten-Herdecke in Germany again I was drawn to the phenomenon of heat from another perspective: mistletoe therapy.  It was Rudolf Steiner himself who introduced Mistletoe to cancer treatment; he recognized cancer as an illness of the cold where the beneficial body heat (fever) is missing. Mistletoe, if correctly used clearly improves circadian body core temperature rhythms.

But only in the early 90s when I started my education as an oncologist at the first German Hospital that used hyperthermia in cancer treatment a circle closed. I immediately felt this to be my destiny as a scientist and medical doctor: To explore the possibilities of heat and fever in oncology.  After I finished my training in oncology I, therefore, chose to train as an immunologist.

During my post-doc in immunology at the renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in New York City, I became a close friend of Helen Coley-Nauts, a distinguished research scientist in her late 70s; I was 33. It was her father William B. Coley who is named to be the father of Cancer Immunotherapy.  It was he who introduced the Fevertherapy of cancer to the modern world. He became world-famous by treating thousands of cancer patients with bacterial vaccines. These were aimed to induce fever in the patients – later called Coley toxins.  This story can be viewed in the recent documentary of Dr. Ralph Moss, Immunotherapy, the battle within.  After my time in New York, I was honored to head an expert commission for the Fevertherapy of cancer at the young Office of Alternative Medicine OAM, now named OCCAM at the NH in Washington, DC.

In 2015 the circle of heat and cancer closed for the second time in my life: The discovery and later on Nobel prize for medicine for the detection of immune Checkpoint inhibitors brought me to the idea to combine the latter with all types of fever treatment in cancer: Local regional hyperthermia, whole-body hyperthermia and direct fever treatment with IL-2 (a powerful immunostimulatory cytokine capable of inducing fever). 

This combined concept may be looked upon as a future possible breakthrough treatment in cancer treatment. We continue actively exploring scientifically and clinically the fascinating aspects of this multimodal treatment with a growing number of unusually successfully treated patients.

Therefore, I would like to thank God for leading me on this path.  The prayer of the native American Indian is always a ‘Thank you Grandfather’ so I would like to conclude: Thank you, Father!