Essiac Essentials

the court with the following definitions:
     
    Food : A natural substance or combination of bio-organic substances containing nutrients or nutritive products to:
    • maintain and support living tissues
    • permit the regeneration of living cells
    • supply energy for the physiological equilibrium within an organism
     
    Drug: A substance or combination of substances, usually made of synthetic or isolated compounds and matter (other than food) that alters or modifies:
    • the physical state
    • the psychological state
    • the emotional state
     
    Remedy: A substance or combination of substances usually originating from a natural source that can correct the physiological equilibrium within an organism.
     
    Conclusion: Food can be remedial without being a drug.
    Essiac can be remedial and is not a drug.
     
    Myth: Rene Caisse tested the formula on 55,000 people.
    Reality: Logically and mathematically this must be an exaggeration. These figures relate primarily to the period from 1936 to 1939 when Rene was not only responsible for operating her clinic but also acquiring the herbs and preparing the remedy herself. One woman, working primarily alone and without the sophisticated laboratory and communications equipment we take for granted today, could neither have produced enough herbal tea to treat so many people nor kept so many written records. Anyone who has harvested the herbs and made up the decoction in any quantity knows just how long and how much hard work it takes.
    Nevertheless the number of people Rene treated with her formula is impressive by any standards, as are the thousands of signatures collected in her support in 1938.
     
    Myth: There is documented evidence dating from the 1930s showing the complete recovery of thousands of cancer patients who had been certified in writing by their doctors as incurable.
    Reality : Records of hundreds of patients with cancer and other serious health conditions were kept by Rene during the 1930s. Some doctors signed written diagnoses but, by 1937, most were reluctant to commit their signatures to such statements.
    She testified to the two examining Commissioners who visited the clinic in 1939 to “between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred (patients) in the past three years.”
     
    Myth: Rene achieved an 80% success rate using the tea.
    Reality : Rene never once made such a claim. Only a limited number of her written records survive, certainly not sufficient to prove such a figure. From the beginning not all the records were kept.
    “Sometimes if the patients did not come back we just tore up the cards and threw them away.”
     
    Myth: Rene kept the freely given Native American formula secret because she was self-seeking and arrogant.
    Reality : Let her speak for herself, as she testified under oath to the Commissioners:
    “I was afraid that with all the money being spent on radium and X-ray and those sort of things, that it being a simple treatment, they would shelve it without a full enough investigation of its merits. You know how people are sort of inclined to scoff at anything simple and the deeper things interest them much more. I was just afraid that it would not be given a fair test whether it had merit or not. I thought that if I cured enough people, it could not be disputed, and I would be sure that when I handed it over to the medical profession, that it would be made available to the cancer sufferers. ”
     
    Myth: All Rene’s work was destroyed by the Canadian government after her death.
    Reality : The Canadian government was not involved in any way. Rene’s relatives were left to clear her house after her death. They had an auction of her personal effects on the front lawn and one woman bought one of her paintings for $1.50 without knowing what she was buying. No one had the time to go through all the paperwork, no government officials came to claim it and a lot of it was burned one weekend in the back yard.
     
    Myth: Rene measured the herbs in the original recipe in ‘parts by weight’.
    Reality : Rene never measured the herbs in ‘parts by weight’. Some people who have subsequently interpreted the entire recipe in ‘parts by weight’ have created a completely unbalanced formula, e.g. they have weighed out fifty-two ounces of Burdock root (approximately 3.25lbs) instead of measuring fifty-two ounces in volume (approximately 1.5lbs).
    When Rene was making up the decoction she always measured by volume (which is the North American