Caisse Tea - The Natural Cure for Cancer? (Part 3)

In 1922, Rene Caisse, a Canadian oncology nurse, was given an Ojibway herbal formula by one of her patients. Over the next 50 years, she used this tea that she called Essiac (Caisse spelled backwards) to successfully treat thousands of cancer patients, documenting hundreds of cases of cancer remissions of patients who had been abandoned by orthodox medicine as hopeless. Her story has been well referenced in books and articles, recounting numerous success stories from those who have benefited from this safe, simple herbal formula. Her work has been described as “one of the most remarkable stories in all of medicine”.

Rene M. Caisse, RN (1888 – 1978)

In “I Was Canada's Cancer Nurse – The Story of ESSIAC”, Rene Caisse told the story of her discovery of this herbal cancer treatment from a patient, an elderly lady whose right breast was a mass of scar tissue. She had experienced advanced breast cancer 30 years earlier and was told by doctors in Toronto that her breast had to be removed immediately.

Before seeing the doctors, however, an old Ojibway medicine man had told her that she had cancer and that he could cure it. The woman decided to try his remedy instead of the surgery. The medicine man showed her the herbs that grew in the area and told her how to make a tea from them. When Rene Caisse met her, she was almost 80 years old and had never suffered a recurrence of cancer.

Rene Caisse wrote down the names of the herbs the woman had used and decided then that if she ever developed cancer, she would use this herb tea. About a year later, she visited an elderly retired doctor of her acquaintance. As they walked through his garden, he pointed out a plant and told her, “If people would use this weed, there would be very little cancer in the world”. When told the name of the plant, burdock, Rene recognized it as one ingredient in the medicine man's tea.

Her First Cancer Patient

A few months later, her aunt was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach and given, at most, 6 months to live. She asked her aunt's doctor, with whom she was already acquainted, if she could try the tea on her aunt under his supervision, since there was nothing more medical science could do for her. He consented. She obtained the herbs and prepared the tea. Her aunt lived for another 21 years with no recurrence of cancer.

After many other similar successes, in 1926, eight of the doctors who had witnessed her successful treatments of their patients petitioned the Department of National Health and Welfare at Ottawa, asking that Rene Caisse be provided with facilities for independent research. Soon after, rather than being given the means to “prove her work in a large way” as requested by those eight physicians, doctors were sent to arrest her for “practicing medicine without a license”.

Instead of being arrested, however, one of the investigating doctors became so interested in her treatments that it was arranged for her to do further research on mice. After several years of experimentation with the herbal formula and the delivery of it, doctors began sending patients to her. She was treating about 30 patients a day from her apartment.

(Part 3 of this series is continued next week.)