Essiac Tea as an Alternative Cancer Treatment???
A cold herbal tea, Essiac was first obtained from a Native American healer in Canada. Based on age-old traditions, this combination of herbs has proven successful for thousands of people with cancer over many decades. It was eventually rigorously tested and endorsed in the United States by President Kennedy’s personal physician, Dr. Charles A. Brusch. As the story goes, many herbal supplements began with trial and error cures:
In 1922, a kindhearted nurse of Haileybury, Ontario, noticed a female patient with a severely scarred and disfigured breast. Asking the woman about her scars, She was told an amazing story of how years earlier the woman had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Canadian doctors had told the woman she must have her breast removed immediately. However, in desperation, the woman turned to a more natural route that had been told to her by an Ojibwa Indian medicine man.
The Indian medicine man told her of a combination of herbs to brew into a tea and drink daily. He told her this would cure the cancer in her breast and not require it to be removed. She did as the medicine man instructed and as she sat telling her nurse the story years later, she obviously had not had the surgery and yet she had no recurrence of the cancer!
The nurse asked the patient for the formula for the tea and wrote it down but never really pursued making it. A few years later when her aunt was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Rene began giving the tea to her aunt. After two months of drinking the tea daily, The aunt rallied and lived an additional 21 years with no recurrence of cancer just as the lady with breast cancer had done!
In her desire to help the sick, the nurse began to give the tea to others with wonderful results. People with various kinds of cancer, diabetes and more seemed to improve with the use of this tea. She decided the unique combination of these particular herbs somehow seemed to cause the different organs in the body to "normalize" helping the body's own immune system to fight and "correct" whatever was wrong.
This amazing formula, made up only four simple herbs, is believed to normalize body systems by cleansing the blood, purging toxic build up, promoting cell repair and aiding in effective assimilation and elimination. While incredibly simple, when combined with each other, these four herbs and their separate individual effects are greatly enhanced.
The nurse decided to called the tea "Essiac®," her last name spelled backwards. As time went on, Rene Caisse continued to "treat" those considered terminally ill with very positive results. Health officials vacillated back and forth between a love/hate attitude toward her. While she never openly claimed the tea would cure ALL cancers it did seem to have a definite effect on many and it undeniably promoted wellness, general good health and strengthened the immune system.
Her desire was to make the tea available to everyone. She operated a Cancer Treatment Clinic in Canada using her tea for many years, but never charging for any services. She used the herbal tea herself every day and finally died in 1978 at the age of 90.
Her desire was never for financial gain but rather that the formula for this old Indian herbal tea could be used to help mankind. Rene did not want to "sell" her formula to drug companies since she did not want it to get tied up in bureaucratic "red tape" or "shelved" and discredited like so many other "natural" remedies. However, as she grew old, she finally sold the rights to this formula for only $1. She did this hoping the tea could be developed and made easily available to the public. Now many companies are using a combination four herb formula and making it available to everyone.
Essiac is currently mass-produced in a variety of forms and by a variety of companies. Many people have continued to experience success with it for cancer, but as with any mass-produced herbal treatment, finding a good quality product is extremely important. Combining Essiac with some other alternative cancer approaches has also proven helpful for many cancer patients. (However, it cannot be combined with Protocel)