A different approach to cancer treatment

1. Coordination with your standard treatment

The hospital agrees the program with your oncologist at home, schedules hyperthermia around your chemotherapy or radiotherapy cycles, and can give certain chemotherapy regimens on site. Your cancer medication is not changed without this coordination. How integrative cancer treatment is planned

2. Local-regional hyperthermia

Applicators on the body surface heat the tumor region to 40–44 °C / 104.0–111.2 °F for about 60 minutes, two to three times a week, without anesthesia. The hospital uses it alongside chemotherapy or radiotherapy, which is the setting the trials studied. What local-regional hyperthermia involves

3. Whole-body hyperthermia

The core body temperature is raised under sedation and continuous monitoring, in sessions of four to six hours, with recovery days between sessions. For tumor patients it is combined with chemotherapy or immunotherapy. What a whole-body hyperthermia session involves

4. Immune therapies

Depending on the immune profile: mistletoe extract (Viscum album), thymus peptides, high-dose vitamin C infusions and, in selected cases, dendritic cell preparations. Repeat testing in the second week shows whether the immune markers move. What immune therapy involves, high-dose vitamin C infusions

5. Insulin-potentiated low-dose chemotherapy (IPT)

A controlled dose of insulin, then a fraction of the standard dose of a chemotherapy drug, then glucose, with a physician and a nurse present for the whole session of two to three hours. IPT is not guideline care. Your physician offers it as a treatment attempt, decided with you, and only alongside or after the regimen your oncologist recommends. How IPT works and what is known about it

6. Photodynamic therapy

Photodynamic therapy activates a light-sensitive agent with light of a specific wavelength. Suitability is assessed by tumor site and indication.

7. Supportive care

Nutritional medicine, detoxification protocols where a measured burden calls for them, physiotherapy and psychosomatic support run alongside the program, so that the patient is in condition for the next cycle at home. All oncology therapies, each with its evidence level

Hyperthermia added to radiotherapy or chemotherapy: strong in named indications. In the Dutch Deep Hyperthermia Trial, adding hyperthermia to radiotherapy in locally advanced pelvic tumors improved complete response and, in cervical cancer, survival (van der Zee et al., Lancet, 2000). A meta-analysis of locoregional recurrent breast cancer found higher complete response rates with hyperthermia plus radiotherapy than with radiotherapy alone (Datta et al., Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys, 2016). In high-risk soft-tissue sarcoma, the EORTC randomized trial of chemotherapy with or without regional hyperthermia showed longer local progression-free and disease-free survival (Issels et al., Lancet Oncology, 2010), and the long-term analysis reported improved overall survival (Issels et al., JAMA Oncology, 2018). In these settings our use of hyperthermia rests on randomized trials. Outside them it rests on decades of clinical experience on our ward, and the published evidence is moderate to emerging.

Mistletoe: moderate for quality of life, limited for survival. A systematic review and meta-analysis found improved quality of life in cancer patients treated with mistletoe extracts (Loef and Walach, BMC Complement Med Ther, 2020). The same group's survival meta-analysis reported an association, with low certainty because of the quality of the included studies (Loef and Walach, Integr Cancer Ther, 2022). The hospital uses mistletoe as a supportive therapy, not as a tumor treatment.

High-dose vitamin C: emerging. A small randomized trial in metastatic pancreatic cancer (36 patients randomized) added pharmacological ascorbate to gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel with overall survival as the primary outcome (Bodeker et al., Redox Biology, 2024); it is a phase II signal, not a standard of care. The hospital gives high-dose vitamin C within the supportive part of the plan.

Integrative care during standard treatment: endorsed for symptoms. ASCO endorsed the Society for Integrative Oncology guideline on integrative therapies during and after breast cancer treatment for anxiety, mood, quality of life and treatment side effects (Lyman et al., J Clin Oncol, 2018).

IPT and dendritic cells: limited. The literature for these consists of case series, cohort data and pharmacological studies. Your physician offers them as treatment attempts and explains the state of knowledge for each before you consent.

What the evidence does not show. No study shows that integrative oncology can replace surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Responses differ from patient to patient; the physicians document the course so that your oncologist at home can follow it.