Common Weeds

Rene Caisse was a Canadian nurse. In 1922, while caring for an elderly patient, she noticed a mass of scar tissue on one of the patient's breasts. The old woman told her that doctors had diagnosed her with breast cancer years ago, but without money for surgery, she had gone home to die. There, she came in contact with an old Ojibwa medicine man who told her he could cure her condition with a tea. He showed the woman which herbs and plants to use. Consequently, thirty years later, she was alive to pass this story on to Nurse Caisse.

A short time later, Rene Caisse was walking with a retired doctor. He pointed out a common plant and said, "Nurse Caisse, if more people would use this weed, there would be little cancer in the world." The weed was sheep sorrel; one of the plants the old woman told her was in the medicine man's tea.

Over the next fifty years, Rene Caisse used this tea with a number of cancer patients who went on to live double digit numbers of years. She experimented on lab mice and human cancer patients and eventually developed her own herbal formula which has survived to today and is known as Essiac (her surname spelled backwards).

Over the years, patients and families petitioned the Ontario government to allow Nurse Caisse to officially treat cancer patients, and while this was denied, she was allowed to treat patients under the supervision and observation of a group of doctors. Impressed by what they saw, they petitioned the government for broader studies of the treatment. However, with heavy pharmaceutical influence, Nurse Caisse was continually threatened with arrest once the petition had been delivered to the government, and she finally withdrew from public view. As a result, Essiac tea has been marginalized, minimalized, and never thoroughly explored.

Nicholai takes a tincture of herbs which includes those used in Nurse Caisse's tea. I used them as well. Like Nurse Caisse's reported patients, we are still here to tell about it. Doesn't that at least deserve a little research?