The Vancouver Sun Article by Mia Stainsby

Cancer Hope Reborn Essiac is a herbal remedy that is said to have cured thousands of terminal cancer cases since the 1920's. Peggy Good was a goner two years ago. In the previous two years, surgeons performed a quadruple bypass to rescue an ailing heart. As if that wasn't enough for a lifetime, there was this other matter of ovarian cancer, a tumor as big as a grapefruit. Surgeons went in again, removed some of the tumor, but left some behind. Too risky. Too close to the vital organs. That wasn't the end of it. She developed diabetes and learned all about injecting insulin in her veins.Then she started chemotherapy. And she agonized. She had two months to a year to live, doctors told her. After five sessions of chemo, Peggy, 70, couldn't take any more of the chemo-misery and told doctors she preferred to die in peace. "I was not even human", she says. "I was sick to my stomach, I had headaches, fevers, I was not eating. I was going downhill very fast in the five months I was taking chemo." So when Peggy heard about a woman in Vancouver that apparently had worked magic on terminal cancers victims, she was curious. She phoned the woman, Elaine Alexander, who said, "Try it, see if it helps!" The herbal tea, Peggy learned, was called "essiac." She had nothing to lose, she reasoned, and obtained some. Peggy is certain essiac saved her life-- handed it back in better condition than she'd known for a long time. After six weeks of ingesting essiac , a frightening event took place in the middle of the night. "I'm wetting the bed," she thought. She looked under the covers. Thick, greyish matter poured from her vagina, "It looked like scum, like pus," she says. Over the next couple of weeks she excreted "awful stuff". Then death began to lose its grip. "It's hard to explain to people, it's too unreal," she says. "I started to feel so good, I couldn't believe anyone could feel so good. I felt better than I had in the last 10 to 15 years". Joie de vivre returned. When she returned to the BC Cancer Clinic for a scheduled examination, the doctor gave her a clean bill of health. Shocked, stunned, she fell silent. He too was silent. He repeated, "I'm giving you a clean bill of health." Then he walked out. In the days that followed, she started having a reaction to the insulin injections and slowly went off the needle. "All I know is that I take nothing for diabetes now." Six weeks after she started on essiac, she was turning sod on the first of three large flower beds. Back when Peggy was sick, she confided to her husband that she wished t hey had bought a motorhome and done a bit of traveling. "You get out of this and I'll get you a motorhome,"he told her. Two years later, they've logged thousands of kilometers in their four-wheeled home. She has signed up for guitar lessons and she drinks in the countryside on her long walks. Life is full of newfound meaning. This isn't where the story ends. Her husband Harold, now 71, has one to tell too. He had a prostate problem for years. Every night, he got up to urinate almost once an hour, a painful and exhausting ritual. Doctors advised him it wasn't time "to do anything yet" about the condition. Harold started taking essiac last year. Early one evening, exhausted, he went to bed. He got up later, went to the bathroom in a sleepwalk and went back to bed. Peggy was astonished to see what he left behind in the toilet bowl. A "bowl-full of pus", as she describes it. She went to wake him, to tell him there was something wrong, but he was deep in sleep. That was his last nightly excursion to the bathroom. By last February, Peggy, a personification of understatement, believed in miracles. She gave some of her essiac to an octogenarian neighbor. He had been give one month to live and members of his family had arrived from England to prepare for a funeral. Peggy and Harold motored off for a three week holiday. When they returned, they saw the neighbor walking down the road, "full of jokes and smiling and laughing and carrying on", says Peggy. His relative took some essiac back to England for a family member with lung cancer. "I understand she was to the point where she was bedridden and wouldn't let anyone in the house. After two or three weeks, she got up and to bingo. The relatives are keeping me posted. I'm certainly a believer," says Peggy. "I'm sure I would be dead without essiac. I was ready for bygones." Rene Caisse, a nurse from Bracebridge, is the legendary figure who unleased the tsunami wave of controversy. (Essiac is Caisse spelled backwards.) Caisse reportedly healed thousands of terminal cancer victims with essiac in her clinic in the early '20s, '30s, and early '40s. Since essiac was never tested or approved as a drug, she worked only with the hopeless cases. She claimed essiac would not be as effective in combination with radiation treatment and chemotherapy. At the height of her involvement, Caisse saw up to 600 patients a week. She never claimed essiac was the panacea for all cancer cases, but the legacy of testimony and surviving patients leaves a big question. What exactly did it do? Caisse originally obtained a crude recipe from a patient who, in her youth, had treated breast cancer with it. The patient got the recipe from a Ojibway medicine man in northern Ontario. When Caisse's aunt was in the final stages of cancer, Caisse got permission from her aunt's doctor to give her the herbal tonic. After two months of treatment, the aunt recovered. She lived for another 20 years. Caisse and the doctor tried it on other cancer patients and they, too, improved. Over the next two decades, Caisse played cat and mouse with Canadian federal health officials. Bracebridge city council gave her the use of an old hotel as a clinic to treat cancer patients diagnosed as "hopeless" by two or three doctors. The authorities demanded clinical tests. But she stubbornly refused to divulge her formula unless she got official assurance that essiac would not be lost to the people who needed it. Her first loyalty was to the people who came to depend on her but the authorities couldn't give her the assurance she wanted. Finally, fearing prosecution, she closed the clinic in 1942 and went in seclusion. During Caisse's high profile years, Dr. Frederick Banting, of insulin fame, wanted to test the substance in his laboratory, but Caisse eventually backed down because he wanted her to close the clinic while test were underway on mice. Two Ontario premiers, Mitchell Hepburn and Leslie Frost, responding to constituents, went to bat for her. At one point 55,000 North Americans, including many doctors, signed a petition supporting a private member's bill to allow Caisse to practice medicine in Ontario in the treatment of cancer. The bill missed passing by 3 votes. Instead, a commission to investigate cancer remedies was created to pass judgment on essiac. 387 of Caisse's patients showed up to speak on her behalf. At another time when she came under fire from authorities when a terminally ill cancer victim died, 17,000 signatures were collected. The world's largest cancer research center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, could not wrestle the formula from Caisse despite pressing and pursuing. A steady stream of doctors visited her in Bracebridge, observing case files, talking to patients, and leaving testimonials. She was offered huge sums of money to commercialize essiac, but refused all but minimal amounts of payment for her services, often running after clients who gratefully and quietly left her money. She lived a modest life in a modest house, clinging to her secrets, fearing the herbal mixture could become difficult or illegal to acquire. Rene Caisse died in 1978, at the age of 90. Before she died, she signed over the rights to the essiac formula to two parties: Resperin Corp. of Toronto, to test, manufacture and distribute it, and to a long-trusted friend, Dr. Charles Brusch of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Director of the prestigious Brusch Clinic and personal physician to former U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Dr. Brusch himself had cancer of the lower bowel, which completely disappeared after essiac treatments. Resperin's clinical trials, conducted between 1978 and 1982, were shut down under the Canadian Food and Drug Act because of poor documentation, poor test procedures, and poor results. Ed Zalesky, 63, of White Rock, was one of the patients treated with Essaic™ in 1978 during the Resperin clinical trials. "When they diagnosed me with cancer of the small intestine, they took out four feet of gut but couldn't get all the cancer. They said I had six months without radiation and two years with radiation". Fourteen years later, he's still impressively alive, running "Surrey's best-kept secret", the Canadian Museum of Flight. He devotes seven intensive and unpaid days a week to his passion for planes. In a 1982 letter to the editor of an Orilla, Ontario newspaper, he blasted critics of essiac. "Why can't the people who administer cancer funds give it a fair trial? It isn't going to hurt anyone and the medical profession should stop playing God and allow us cancer patients to use the treatment of our choice." The main ingredients in essiac are: burdock root, sheep sorrel herb, turkey rhubarb root and slippery elm bark, all of which grow abundantly in Ontario. Dr. Jim Chan, a Vancouver naturopathic physician, who also teaches at Bastyr College in Seattle, says burdock root contains inulin, a very powerful immune modulator. "It hooks on to the surface of white blood cells and makes them work better", he says. Chan has obtained essiac for cancer patients through the emergency drug release program and says, "It's not 100 percent effective. It depends on the individual scenario, in terms of the kind of carcinoma and when they start taking essiac". He has the highest success with those who had the least amount of radiation or chemotherapy, but most people look at the essiac alternative in the very late stages. In 1977, Homemaker's magazine initiated an investigative story on essiac. "Little by little, our skepticism gave way to a mounting entusiasm", two reporters wrote. They interviewed scores of former "hopeless" cancer victims who lived for decades after essiac treatment. They reviewed hundreds of patient cases. They researched the complicated anecdotal and political history and concluded, "Essentially, Rene's story was true. She had been getting remarkable results against many kinds of cancer with essiac, and she had been prevented from carrying on treatment unless she revealed the formula." Homemaker's magazine staff were so convinced that essiac should be give a shot at either succeeding or failing that they took the unusual step of asking to get involved. They offered to set up a trust to represent Caisse in speeding essiac through the bureaucratic maze to get a patent, while protecting the formula. Weary of fighting, Rene Caisse declined the offer.