What the heck is ESSIAC?

By Ted SusuMago
585 Palmer Rd
Ashland Oregon

ESSIAC is an herbal decoction with proven healing properties. Freely given by an Ojibwa medicine man in 1892, it has generated one of the most compelling stories in modern medicine. Rene M Caisse, the woman who spelled her name backwards to give it a name,cured her mother of terminal cancer with it in 1924, then proceeded to successfully treat thousands of cancer patients over the next 54 years

The government and the medical establishment in both the U.S. and Canada reacted with vindictiveness,surveilling her, sabotaging her research and threatening her with arrest and imprisonment. She persisted but so did the establishment,and today Essiac is only slightly closer to legalization as a treatment for cancer than it was in 1924 when Rene Caisse cured her mother with it.

There is change afoot, compelling change in public attitutes about personal choice in health care. There are new laws on the books in several states,laws that legalize the use of unapproved therapies by physicians (IE Oregon) Typically pioneers like Rene Caisse do not see their work come to full fruition in their lifetimes, but we believe she will not have missed it by much

It is time to reintroduce Essiac to mainstream medicine

This article is a critical next-step in Rene Caisse’s work with Essiac. We publish it to thrust Essiac forward, to offer it to mainstream medicine as she attempted to do all her life. Although Essiac never gained acceptance that Rene believed it deserved, we are confident that changes in the regulatory environment are freeing physicians to look anew at an old remedy, provided there is compelling evidence to do so. Our challange,then, is to present that evidence in compelling fashion, no small task, given that Rene Caisse’s records have been scattered,destroyed,or secreted away to protect them.

In presenting this article,we openly acknowledge that, compared to the many controlled studies of other medicines, Essiac today has little science to offer. We expect that what we present will satisfy few who are looking for nothing but science, but will in some way intrigue everyone. Some of you will find adequate justification to apply Essiac in your practices,or lifestyle ,some will choose to await further documentation, and some will reject Essiac .Our goal is to work to make Essiac available because it works

In all likelihood science per se will probably never weigh in on either side of the Essiac contreversy. The role of the medical research is to remove the question of efficacy from subjective interpretation, to prove to objective intellect that conclusions rendered are immune to dispute because they meet certain statistical norms. By strict monitoring objectively quantified variables, we expect to achieve a degree of reliable truth,upon which subsequent decisions and actions can be based. But in medical research truth (read efficacy),comes with a price of ten years of research and $250 million dollars. What supporter of Essiac has such resources?

In this way, research backed by government tend to monopolize public perception. With virtually unlimited resources to air messages, science in the public interest with the government’s usual support, dimisses much of the Essiac phenomenon because it does not possess reliable parameters within which to study it or the regulatory and commercial incentives to control it. Out of hand, then, it must disregard reliable accounts of people that rose from deathbeds to live another twenty years after taking Essiac and Essiac Tea. It must ignore the photographs contained in documents and the endorsements of physicians whose skepticism turned to amazement at the results Rene Caisse achieved before their eyes. It must discount the stunned amazement of a nobel laureat who candidly admitted that Essiac was as close to a cure for cancer as anyone had ever come. And it must close its ears to the outrage of the citizens it claims to protect.

But a strange thing happened on the way to the millenium. People who implicitly trusted their government conventional medicine began to find their self-awareness muted,their personal power blunted. They began to challange the health care monopoly and to seek answers outside the mainstream. Now what medicine thought was a passing fancy has become a river of creative thought and endeavor of people questing,asking,probing, and coming to terms with the fact that they,and not the practitioner,are responsible for their health.

To its credit,in some quarters government and medicine are yeilding to this predominately healthy trend. It is not without a struggle,though ,as the FDA and proponents of health care freedom battle over who will decide how you are healed. It is within this context that Essiac and other alternative treatments for degenerative disease have exploded into the public awareness with undeniable certitude. And with their acceptance,there is commensurate diminution of public expectation that all things be scientifically proven to the degree that we have been told is necessary to render such treatments efficacious.

Of course,there are those that say this new public attitude does not mean scientific proof is less important,and is many cases we heartily agree, especially where substances are toxic,marginally effective,and extremely expensive. However,with Essiac it is preposterous to confine this remedy to the loboratory while people are ill or dying. Rene Caisse raged at this requirement by the medical establishment,saying she would never agree to cease treating people while Essiac was tested on rats - again. It is outrageous that a safe,non-toxic treatment that often nursed back to health, patiens after they had been ravaged not just by cancer, but by the full armamentarium of conventional therapies,should be used not as a primary,but a tertiary treatment if at all. Rene only treated referrals from a physician,and these referrals only came after everything elese had been tried and had failed. It is equally preposterous for the FDA to even now refuse permission for practitioners to use Essiac, given that its value has been documented for over 70 years in the trenches where real people fought real cancers day in and day out- and won often enough to ignite the interest of every practitioner who ever closely observed its application and the smoldering frustrations of a public desparate for effective treatment for cancer.

Simply put, the government,medical researchers, and the pharmaceutical companies would have us believe that empiricism has no place in deciding which treatments are effective and which are not. problematic,government holds us to this standard by making it illegal to claim efficacy without sufficient clinical testing,which usually means many years and many millions of dollars. Rene Caisse herself said " Until the public is aroused,and demands the liberty and freedom to get the treatment of their choice, this tragedy will continue for an indefinite time"

We feel that this time is no longer indefinite, that the public is increasingly aroused, and that it is the right moment to introduce Essiac to mainstream medicine. Oregon and five other states have alternative treatment laws, that legalize the use of unapproved treaments as long as there is some scientific basis for their use. Six other states have similar legislation pending, and public petitions are now circulating to force the federal government to match these state statutes with one of its own. This movement is unprecedented and speaks of vital change.

Rene was challanged by medical prejudice which frequently asserted what cures she might attribute to Essiac were in fact the delayed effects of conventional therapies, spontaneous remissions, or misdiagnoses of the patient’s original condition. Those same prejudices persist today, but in making our case we are challanged now by yet another difficulty- the tendency of complementary medicine to use several different treatments simultaneously, thereby clouding Essiac’s contribution to the healing process.

How then, is one to present a cogent case for Essiac ? We will present what lab test results we have. We will quote your fellow physicians who witnssed Rene Caisse’s work first hand. We will present testimonials from patients and their families, and case studies from Rene’s time and more recently. We will make a case for empiricism, then rely on it far more than mainstream research would even allow.

Rene’s perseverance ensured that this simple,safe remedy would be available to all of us,but in the last months of her life, she despaired for the survival of her legacy. She could not have known in what form her life’s work would endure, but endure it has.

It is not a pretty picture. The essence of her life experience with Essiac has been savaged by mercantile interests that border on fraud, and internecine struggles over trademarks and authenticity of formulas seriously challenged Essiac’s survival as a genuine agent of health and healing. Manufacturers of every nature concoct variations of an incomplete, incorrectly-proportioned decoction with no rationale for doing so except the hope that flashy modifications will catch the consumer’s eye and hook his wallet. Consequently , as much as we would like to sidestep this conflict, it is impossible to do so.

There is only one Essiac that is made from Rene Caisse’s original formula. We possess this formula in Rene Caisse own handwriting, along with the formulas for four other products and 240 galenical variations of the basic decoction. These formulas are kept secret for the same reason that Rene Caisse kept them secret- to protect Essiac from the overwhelming power of commercial interests with the resources to bury or discredit competing products.

Rene spent her life looking for an ally, a powerful,ethical entity or sufficient stature that would agree to continue her work, keep Essiac in the public eye, and unflinchingly defend it from mindless bureaucrats and the pharmaceutical cartels that so dominate public awareness. She never found that friend, although she tried up until the year before her death when she agreed to terms with the Respirin Corporation that promised her the world and delivered nothing. In a spasm of her self -serving artifice and commercialism, that company now claims that it continues Rene’s work with her blessing, a claim as far removed from the truth as one could be.

We expect that emphirical evidence of Essiac’s effectiveness and its remarkable record of nontoxicity will justify its use at least as an adjunct to conventional cancer treatment. We are confident that with this toe in the door, Essiac will prove itself. With its documented ability to ease the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation, with its non narcotic analgesis properties that permitted many of Rene Caisse’s patients to get off pain medication, and with its extremely low price in comparison to conventional medication, there remains no rational justification for ignoring it.

We also expect that practitioners of every profession will begin to acknowledge Essiac’s preventive properties and to recommend that their patients promote health by detoxifying on a regular basis. We are currently talking to two alternative health care insurers who are tapping into burgeoning public demand for alternative health coverage.These companies have found that it is extremely cost-effective to provide health maintenance rather than cure. One company’s premiums are typically 20% lower than conventional plans with the same coverage

We must emphasize that the testimonials,comments,endorsement, and case histories presented here flow from the use of one basic Essiac formulation.-the original. You must set aside everything you have heard about Essiac that refers to 4,6,8, herb formulas ,cold pressed, freeze-dried, powdered, augmented, alcohol containing, vacum-extracted,capsules, drops ,pills coiloidal etc THESE ARE NOT ESSIAC Many other companies have relied on Rene’s story to enhance their sales. This amounts to trademark infrindgement because the trademark Essiac ® belongs to a specific company in the U.S and Mexico and other places This is fraud because Rene did not use their formulas to treat patients

In the years since Rene Caisse’s death in 1978, but especially between 1992 and the present, a phletora of formulations has swept through the marketplace, each formula with a claim to authenticity.. According to the information we possess, thay are all incomplete, incorrectly proportioned,and incorrectly prepared. This is not to say they are totally without benefit. It is to say that we can only make one case- that for the authentic formulation that has saved so many lives over most of this century. We do not want the results Rene’s original formula achieved to be associated with any other product in your mind. The others must stand on their own. We cannot comment on their efficacy with any degree of accuracy,and truthfully, neither can their producers and marketers, for they have little or no depth of experience, and nothing to compare with 72 years tha Rene’s original formula has been in use.

Therefore ,one of our goals is to educate you about Essiac is about what is not. Essiac is produced by Essiac Products Services Inc in Florida, and by Easy-Ac in Canada.Gilbert Blondin and Dr. Pierre Gaulin own and operate the two companies. Both companies produce all five products mentioned and have access to the 240 galenical formulations. Gilbert obtained the formulas directly from Rene Caisse in 1977, after her massive disappointment with Respirin Corporation. Fearing her secrets would die with her, she turned to the one person she trusted the most at that time and did something she had never done before- she capitulated.

She surrendered to the fact that she was 90 years old,sick,overweight,exhausted,and angry. All the years of caution, suspicion and paranoia,of handing out parts of the formulas for fear that she’d be betrayed if she played her hand fully, had conditioned and, hardened her. But that was finally outweighed by her mortality. Gilbert had devoted himself to Rene since his wife Noella had been cured of cancer with Essiac. Out of gratitute, he drove hundreds of miles each weekend to her delapidated Bracebridge home where he repaired it, painted it,fixed the plumbing and wiring etc. and helped Rene prepare her brew for the patients. No one had ever treated her this way before. No one had demonstrated such gratitude and devotion, and it was for this reason that one day she said to him. " Here Gilbert You are honest and hard working. I want to give you this formula. Do what you can with it" With those simple words, she gave him the sealed envelop containing everthing she had developed over 55 years. It contained the formulas for the Essiac decoction, Essiac Salve, the powerful Essiac injectable, Essiac RMC Kidney Pills, Essiac Enema, and the 240 individualized formulations.

This article because we have been satisfied by our research on the authenticity of products and for the continuation of the LADY and her achievements.

Rene Caisse died December 26 1978