Cancer Treatment in Germany

Unfortunately, many people in Russia and other post-Soviet countries are almost always sure of one thing — that cancer is a death sentence, even though many forms of it can be treated successfully. Some of them, on learning their diagnosis, prefer to go abroad for treatment, to countries where at least 95% of all cancer sites can be treated successfully today.
For a patient from the countries named above, treatment is always a lottery. Will they be seen by a good specialist or a mediocre one? Does that specialist follow modern treatment standards? Will they choose the right approach, or simply say with indifference that nothing can be done? It is this disbelief that anyone can or wants to help — compounded by fear of counterfeit medicines and by the absence of well-considered, risk-adapted treatment — that pushes people towards the decision to go abroad.

In our patients' experience, they cannot rely on the state healthcare system at home, while treatment in private clinics is sometimes more expensive than treatment abroad. On top of that, the rules governing appointment times simply leave doctors no time to explain everything humanely to a person who is terrified, to inform and guide the patient properly, or to support their family.

Specialists say that Russia and other post-Soviet countries have a shortage of qualified staff and a lack of modern equipment. The supply of medicines also remains an acute problem: with basic chemotherapy drugs the situation is more or less resolved. With expensive drugs, however, things are considerably worse.

The shortcomings of cancer care in Russia and other post-Soviet countries include the absence of unified national registries and hospital databases that would make everything clear and transparent: that this particular doctor has successfully treated so many patients with a given condition, with a given five-year survival rate, and has had a certain number of complications and a certain number of deaths over a given period.

As former Soviet citizens, many people are used to placing all responsibility for their treatment on the state; they are not used to solving their problems themselves. Many are convinced that they gave the state their health and their labour and that in return the state owes them treatment; it is easier for them to delegate the decisions to someone else, and they have a mindset that does not allow them to think about the future, to anticipate it or to plan it.

The new generation that has grown up in modern Russia and other countries of the former USSR is already different: they take more care of their health and give more thought to their diet, to their lifestyle and to decisions about preventing and treating disease.

The weaknesses of the healthcare systems in these countries also include underfunding of state medical institutions, a low standard of teaching in medical schools, and a lack of funding for clinical and scientific research and for its rapid introduction into clinical practice.

Support for patients during treatment is poor. How do you cope with the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy? How do you come to terms with the change in your appearance? What do you need to know about complications, and how do you deal with them? When do you need to see a doctor urgently?

The advantages of cancer treatment in Germany have been thoroughly analysed on the basis of our many years of experience in arranging treatment for patients with a cancer diagnosis. They are as follows:

• urgent arrangement of an appointment with leading German oncologists;
• therapy in specialised clinics and departments and in comprehensive cancer centres;
• the highest five-year survival rates in the world;
• treatment started without delay once the diagnosis has been made;
• accurate pathology diagnosis at certified institutes of pathology;
• adequate (and, where possible, gentle) therapy that takes the patient's age and psychological profile into account and matches the extent of spread and the aggressiveness of the disease;
• interdisciplinary collaboration between oncologists, pathologists, surgeons, radiologists, chemotherapy specialists, specialists in nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, and psycho-oncologists;
• multimodal therapy;
• implantation of a port system for chemotherapy to avoid damage to the peripheral veins;
• treatment with authentic latest-generation cytostatic drugs;
• strict adherence to international treatment protocols in line with therapy optimisation studies‎;
• unique programmes for preventing severe reactions to treatment, in particular using gene therapy protocols;
• protocols for preventing and treating recurrence of disease;
• an individually tailored radiotherapy plan;
• radiotherapy that spares healthy organs and tissues as much as possible (dose-volume histogram);
• comprehensive topometry of patients using biometric, X-ray, isotope, ultrasound and MRI examination methods for the clinical and dosimetric
  planning of the course of radiotherapy;
• high survival rates and inclusion in innovative clinical trials