Essiac Essentials

varible and the amount of sun and rain the plants experience during the growing season will also affect the quality and, to a more limited extent, the colour of the tea.
     
    Colour : pale to mid brown, occasionally greenish if the Sheep sorrel has a particularly high chlorophyll content.
     
    Texture : at the most, only very slightly viscous, similar to the smoothness that you might find in a good brandy.
     
    Taste : pleasantly mild, with a slightly woody flavour.
     
    Note: If any of the following characteristics are observed in the undiluted Essiac, it will indicate that the formula has been altered and that the tea may be in some way adulterated or not up to standard:
     
    (a) very thin, pale and watery
    (b) very thick and gluey, so that it is difficult to strain through a kitchen sieve
    (c) yellow
    (d) orange
    (e) red and fermenting.
    (f) very dark brown, almost black
    (g) bitter tasting
     
    Decoctions & Infusions
    Please understand that Rene Caisse’s Essiac is a decoction. Decoctions are very strong, and not like the weak beverage teas such as those sold in tea bags. To make a decoction, hard materials such as barks, roots and seeds must be boiled for some time in a covered porcelain or stainless steel container.
    Sometimes the decoction will be referred to as the ‘liquid’ or the ‘tea’ because when taken at bedtime, on an empty stomach, one ounce of the decoction is mixed with two ounces of warm water to dilute it, and is sipped as a tea.
    When you want to extract primarily the mineral salts and bitter principles of plants, rather than vitamins and volatile ingredients, decoction is your method of preparation. Hard materials — roots, wood, bark and seeds — also require boiling to extract their active ingredients. Hard materials need boiling for about ten minutes and longer steeping to draw these elements out.
    An infusion is a beverage made like a tea by combining boiling water with the green parts or the flowers of plants and steeping to extract their active ingredients. The relatively short exposure to heat in this method of preparation minimizes the loss of volatile elements. Most often the water is poured over the plants, but sometimes the plants are added to boiling water, and the pot is immediately removed from the heat and steeped for a few minutes, with a tight-fitting lid to minimize evaporation.
     

Chapter Five

So Can it Help?
     

     

     
    During her fifty years working with Essiac, Rene Caisse found that a variety of conditions, as well as cancer, responded well to treatment. Most of the cancer cases were considered beyond medical help by the time they reached her clinic. In the early days diagnoses were confirmed by clinical examination and by X-ray, rarely through biopsy, which gave some of the doctors the ready excuse, when people got well, that the cancer must have been wrongly diagnosed in the beginning. At least eighteen different types of cancers from the Bracebridge case histories are on record as having been successfully treated with the tea. These include cancers of:
     
    the breast, cheek, kidney, pancreas, stomach, bladder, oesophagus, jaw, penis, uterus, cervix, ear, lip, prostate, bowel, chin, nose, rectum.
     
    Many of the cancers successfully treated since 1977 are included in the list of early case histories. Others reported are cancer of:
     
    the brain, tonsils, bone, ovaries, eye, salivary gland as well as lymphatic leukaemia and lymphoma.
     
    Rene always said that she could not recall treating anyone with leukaemia, which suggests that it is more a cancer of our time, yet we know of two separate cases involving elderly women who both responded very well to Essiac. One had been given a matter of weeks to live when the cancer was first diagnosed. She lived for another eighteen months, enjoying excellent quality of life and using the time to hand over her work and business concerns to her family. The other lady has been using the formula for three years in conjunction with conventional therapies and is still doing very well.
    Diagnoses involving brain tumours seem to be increasing. Depending on what and where in the brain the tumours are situated, they may not respond so readily to conventional therapies.
    One interesting case we heard of involved a thirty-year-old man who was diagnosed in 1995 as having a tumour on the brain stem. By August of that year his face and neck were so burned with radiation that he didn’t want to go back for more. He started