Rene Caisse
"I WAS CANADA'S CANCER NURSE"

In the mid-twenties, I was head nurse at the sisters of Providence Hospital in a northern Ontario town. One day a nurse was bathing an elderly lady. I noticed one breast was a mass of scar tissue and asked about it. "I came from England nearly 30 years ago," she told me. "I joined my husband prospecting in the wilds of Northern Ontario. My right breast became sore and swollen and painful. My husband brought me to Toronto and the doctors said I had advanced cancer and my breast must be removed at once."

"Before we left camp an old Indian medicine man told me I had cancer but he could cure it. I decided I'd just as soon try his remedy as to have my breast removed. One of my friends had died from breast surgery. Besides, we had no money." They returned to the mining camp and the old Indian showed her certain herbs growing in the area, told her to make a tea from them and to drink it every day. She was nearly 80 years old when I saw her and there had been no recurrence of cancer. I was interested and wrote down the names of the herbs. I knew doctors threw up their hands when cancer was discovered in a patient; it was the same as a death sentence. I decided if I should ever develop cancer I would use this herb tea.

A year later I was visiting a retired doctor whom I knew well. We were walking slowly about his garden when he took his cane and lifted a weed and told me, "if people would use this weed there would be little or no cancer in the world." He told me the name of the plant. It was one of the herbs my patient had used to cure her cancer. A few months later I received word my mother's only sister had been operated on in Brockville, Ontario. The doctors found cancer of the stomach with a liver involvement and gave her six months to live. I asked her Doctor, R.O. Fisher of Toronto, whom I knew well, for permission to try the herbs under his observation. He consented. I obtained the herbs and made the tea. My aunt lived 21 years after being given up by the medical profession. There was no recurrence of cancer. Dr. Fisher and other doctors asked me to use ESSIAC on other hopeless patients. We treated an old man whose face was eaten away and was bleeding so badly the doctors didn't expect him to live more than 10 days. ESSIAC stopped the bleeding in less than 24 hours and the man's face healed. He lived for six months with very little discomfort.

I AM NOT A DOCTOR - I AM A NURSE I have never claimed ESSIAC cures cancer although many of my patients and doctors claim it is a cure. My goal has been control of cancer and alleviation of pain. Cancer patients were successfully treated for over 25 years using ESSIAC . Since I am a nurse, not a physician, I never gave the treatment until I had a written diagnosis of cancer signed by a doctor. I gave my treatment with doctor observation whenever possible.

THE BRACEBRIDGE CLINIC
Dr. Albert Bastedo of Bracebridge arranged with the Mayor and Town Council for me to rent the old British Lion Hotel to use as a cancer clinic. From 1934 to 1942 I treated thousands of patients who came from far and near, most of them given up as hopeless. Some arrived in ambulances and received their first treatments lying down in an ambulance; after a few treatments they walked into the clinic without help. I had absolute faith I could accumulate enough results with different types of cancer, as demanded by the Cancer Society, to bring acceptance of ESSIAC by the medical profession. I did not know of an organized effort to keep a cancer cure from being discovered, especially by an independent researcher.

MY MOTHER WAS AN ESSIAC PATIENT
After I opened my Cancer Clinic in Bracebridge my mother became ill. Four doctors said she had gallstones and her heart was too weak for surgery. Mother was 72. As she got worse I insisted on calling in Dr. Roscoe Graham, a consulting specialist of international fame, for an examination. After consultation Dr. Graham came to me and said, "Your mother has cancer. Her liver is a nodular mass." He thought she would live only a matter of days. I immediately started ESSIAC treatments. Mother recovered and lived free from cancer, just a tired heart. Her extra 18 years repaid me for all the persecution I have endured at the hands of the medical world.

INTEREST BY DOCTORS
Doctors at Northwestern University became interested in ESSIAC. At their invitation I arranged to be in Chicago once a week to treat a group of terminal cancer patients. When asked why I agreed: "I will show results that will surprise your doctors even in these late stages of the disease. The results will be enough to interest the most skeptical doctors." I was proved right. They offered to open a clinic for me in the Passervant Hospital in Chicago if I would stay.

Dr. Richard Leonardo, a surgical specialist and coroner of Rochester, N.Y. came to observe, but scoffed at the idea of any merit in ESSIAC. The first day he talked with patients and stated, "these results are psychological". The second day I invited him to come into my treatment room, examine patients and watch me administer ESSIAC. We had many advanced cases and I did not finish until 7:30. "Young lady, I must congratulate you. You have made a wonderful discovery." After four days of examining patients and observing, he stated, "I like your method of treatment. I feel it will change the whole theory of cancer treatment and will eventually do away with surgery, radiation and x-ray treatments." I appreciated Dr. Leonardo's opinion because he was trained in Germany, Vienna, London and Scotland and had been so skeptical at first.

MY CANCER THEORY:
During the years I operated my Cancer Clinic in Bracebridge, many doctors, surgeons and scientists visited the clinic, read case histories, examined patients and watched me administer ESSIAC treatments. Many said they believed my treatment acted upon the glands of the body. This coincided with a statement made as early as 1926 by Dr. Frederick J. Banting when he reviewed my early work.

One of these cases, a middle aged woman, was a diabetic as well as a cancer victim. Dr. J.A. McInnis of Timmins, Ontario had asked me to treat her. I didn't want to give injections along with Insulin so Dr. McInnis discontinued the Insulin while I gave ESSIAC for a time. If the diabetic condition worsened he would go back to Insulin. To our surprise the diabetic condition improved with the ESSIAC and never returned. The cancer at first became larger and harder and almost caused an obstruction in the bowel. After a few treatments it softened and reduced until it disappeared. X-rays were taken during the treatment to see what was taking place. ESSIAC was discontinued after six months with no trace of either cancer or diabetes. Dr. Banting was impressed with the X-rays and case history. "ESSIAC actuates the pancreatic gland into normal functioning," he said. "Otherwise the patient would have to take ESSIAC for the rest of her life just as she would have had to take Insulin."

My conviction is cancer results from a glandular deficiency. ESSIAC, a combination of non-toxic herbs, supplies a deficiency of a secretion ordinarily supplied by a gland I call "Gland X". This gland should supply a secretion which is resistant to cancer tissue. Lack of this secretion allows malignant cancer cells to prey upon and invade healthy cells and take control. This deficiency cannot be supplied from the outside. It must be supplied through the blood stream. ESSIAC supplies this resistive element. The X gland starts functioning normally secreting into the body's living cells the substance required to resist the onslaught of the malignant cells and restore health to the body. ESSIAC is a blood purifier which stimulates the X gland to do its work in healthy people before malignant cells invade the body. It helped sufferers of malignant diseases for over 25 years; healing and sometimes curing when given before vital organs are destroyed. It renews the abnormal functioning of gland X. It sets up a resistance and cuts off the supply of the substance in the human body upon which malignant cells thrive and multiply. This causes the malignant cells to regress within themselves and gives the healthy cells strength to rebuild themselves/ I believe some people are born with a predisposition to cancer because of a non-functioning X gland.

ESSIAC acts on all the glands. It restores all glands to health and activity. I believe ESSIAC starts the chain reaction in the glandular system which connects and stimulates all glands into normal functioning. Various studies have been made which establish beyond all doubt persons diagnosed by reputable physicians as suffering from cancer but refuse treatment of all kinds live at least as long and often longer than patients receiving orthodox treatments considered permissible by the medical profession. I believe radiation drives cancer in and burns the surrounding tissue. I believe radiation used in heavy doses is a prolific cause of further cancer in the burnt tissues.

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CANCER HOPE REBORN
ESSIAC is a herbal remedy that is said to have cured thousands of terminal cancer cases since the 1920s. Elaine Alexander, a former radio hot line producer, holds the secret formula. Now she hopes to see it become a medically approved treatment-- at last.

Mia Stainsby investigates:

Interest in the treatment, derived from a native remedy, is being revived after three decades of great public interest in the 1920's, 30's and 40's.

The truth of it is, 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 vital organs.

That wasn't the end of it. She developed diabetes and learned all about injecting insulin into 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."

She didn't fear death, but she did have a lot to live for. A caring husband, three great children and a flock of cuddlesome grandkids. And of course, she couldn't forget how rich life used to be, waking up to a Langley morning, looking out at her spot of Earth, surrounded by fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. So when she heard about a woman in Vancouver who had a herbal tea that apparently had worked magic on terminal cancer victims, she was curious.

She phoned the woman, Elaine Alexander, who said, certainly, try it, see if it helps. The herbal tea, Peggy learned, is called ESSIAC. She had nothing to lose, she reasoned, and obtained some at no charge from Alexander.

Peggy is certain ESSIAC saved her life--handed it back in better condition than she'd known it 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."

Over the next couple of weeks she excreted "awful stuff," sometimes two feet long and an inch and a half in diameter. 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.

"He didn't ask me what I had taken, what I had done, so I was left muttering to myself." Doctors never asked her about what happened. "I would gladly have told anybody if they'd asked, but nobody seemed to care."

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 starting on ESSIAC, she was turning sod on the first of three large flower beds on their hectare of land.

Back when Peggy was sick, she confided to her husband Harold that she wished they had bought a motorhome and done a bit of traveling. "You get out of here 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. 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 given 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 relatives 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 went 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."

ESSIAC has received several convincing testimonials from healed cancer patients, yet it's up to a Vancouver woman to convince health authorities to endorse it as a mainstream medication.

The story of ESSIAC is one that has refused to die. It flared into public attention in the 1920's and burned through the 1930's. For two decades, it claimed international attention, grabbed front-page headlines and gathered thousands and thousands of supporters.

Today, Vancouver's Elaine Alexander, a former CJOR hot-line producer, could well be the person who puts to rest, once and for all, the question of whether ESSIAC is scientifically legitimate. But until it's proved efficacious to the satisfaction of the authorities, ESSIAC, for all its anecdotal support, must idle in the parking lot with many other cancer treatments.

After researching ESSIAC for years, Alexander was recently given the rights to its closely guarded formula, the "vital know-how," as she describes it

Rene Caisse, a nurse from Bracebridge Ont., is the legendary figure who unleashed the wave of controversy (ESSIAC is Caisse spelled backwards.)

Caisse reportedly healed thousands of terminal cancer victims with ESSIAC in her clinic in the '20s, '30s, and early '40s. Since ESSIAC was never tested or approved as a drug, she worked only with the hopeless cases, the patients who had nothing to lose. She claimed ESSIAC would not be effective in combination with radiation treatment and chemotherapy.

Patients required a doctor's reference and a diagnosis of terminal cancer from more than one doctor. At the height of her involvement, Caisse and an assistant 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 for the remedy from a patient who, in her youth, had treated breast cancer with it. The patient got the recipe from an 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 terminal cancer patients and they, too, improved.

Over the next two decades, Caisse played cat and mouse with 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, fear9ing prosecution, she closed the clinic in 1942 and went into 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 tests 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 three 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, she came under fire from authorities when a terminally ill cancer victim died, 17,000 signatures were collected.

The world's largest cancer research centre, 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, examining 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.

She died in 1978 at the age of 90, but before she died, she signed over the rights to the ESSIAC formula to two parties: to Respirin Corp. of Toronto, to test, manufacture and distribute it; and to a long-trusted friend, Dr. Charles Brusch of Cambridge, Mass., director of the prestigious Brusch Clinic and personal physician to former U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Brusch himself had cancer of the lower bowel which completely disappeared after ESSIAC treatments.

Respirin'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.

Respirin did not have the final improved-upon ESSIAC formula, since it had insisted on the "original" formula, Alexander says. The company and participating doctors did not have enough of that "know-how" to give ESSIAC a proper trial, she says. Respirin president David Fingard died last year and the company was sold to a U.S. non-profit group called Mankind.

In 1988, an aging Brusch (now 84) signed over his rights to Alexander, who had devoted many hours to ESSIAC on her radio program "Staying Alive". She is determined to set the record straight for ESSIAC.

Only three parties ever had the rights to ESSIAC, Alexander says, fanning out the legal documentation in front of her. "Respirin, Dr. Brusch, and myself." Her lawyer, Martin Gifford, confirms that.

"Respirin, I feel, have been negligent," says Alexander. "Their people had it in their hands for 15 years and didn't so anything with it."

In 1989, Alexander signed a contract with an unnamed health products company to research, test, manufacture and distribute ESSIAC. She keeps the name of the company close to her chest until trials get under way. "Hopefully, we'll prove its efficacy and we'll do it the right way," she says.

Since Caisse's death, products claiming to be ESSIAC have appeared and disappeared. That concerns Alexander. "There are many imitators out there, openly claiming it's the real ESSIAC, and that it's a cure for cancer. It makes me very upset to feel there's such confusion out there, with all the people who don't have time to fool around."

Although ESSIAC didn't make it through the first clinical trials, determined terminal cancer patients have been able to obtain ESSIAC under the Emergency Drug Release Program from Respirin. The EDRP is the same program under which AZT was made available to full-blown AIDS patients until AZT was legalized in 1989.

But the process requires a sympathetic doctor and approval from the program's oncology specialists, after all conventional methods have been tried.

Ed Zalesky, 63, of White Rock, was one of the patients treated with ESSIAC in 1978 during the Respirin clinical trials. "When they diagnosed me with cancer of the small intestine, they took out four feet of gut but couldn't get all of 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 the Orillia, Ont. newspaper, he blasted critics of ESSIAC: "Why can't 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.

"I had a terrible time convincing my doctors to submit the short reports required by Respirin to compile test results, let alone make any commitments. It seems that many doctors refuse to complete the forms or conveniently forget, or make them so vague so as to be useless."

Under the law, any"cure" for an illness must be registered as a drug by the Food and Drug Act under Health and Welfare Canada. The agency's position is that ESSIAC is harmless but ineffective for cancer and that anyone marketing ESSIAC is liable to fines or imprisonment.

Dr. Paul Rennie, director of the BC Cancer Research Centre, Says the first line of defense against cancer must be the tried and true medical approach. but he's open to the possible value of herbal remedies like ESSIAC. "it's worth consideration," he says.

"Products derived from plants have proven to be of tremendous value in treating cancer. For example, an extract from periwinkle is the main arsenal for the treatment of leukemia. We can''t downplay the potential role of herbal medicine.

"Our experience with periwinkle says we have to look at these things fairly seriously, but we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. I've had calls from people saying that slug slime is a wonderful treatment for cancer. I emphasize that the first line of any cancer treatment is the conventional medical forms. Anything else is supplementary."

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. But details and intricacies of harvesting, handling, processing, decocting and treatment were never made public.

Dr. Jim Chan, a Vancouver naturopathic physician who also teaches at Bastyr College, a naturopathic 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, He adds, however, that it is not as powerful as other agents, such as the mycelium of shiitake mushrooms appear to be.

Chan has obtained ESSIAC for cancer patients through the emergency drug release programme and says, "It's not 100 per cent effective, It depends on the individual scenario, in terms of the kind of carcinoma and when they start taking ESSIAC."

He has had the highest success with those who had the least amount of radiation of chemotherapy, but most people look at the ESSIAC alternative in the very late stages. Chan, however, does not encourage going off chemo or radiation therapy and says ESSIAC is not the only great hope for cancer.

In 1977, Homemakers magazine initiated an investigative story on ESSIAC. "Little by little, our skepticism gave way to a mounting enthusiasm," 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," they wrote about Caisse. "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 given 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, she declined the offer.

Alexander, however, believes in and hopes for a happy ending for ESSIAC: "I can only refer to the decades of its open use of terminally ill cancer patients who turned around and lived," she says. MIA STAINSBY

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Nature's Cure for Cancer
BY ELISABETH ROBINSON
Reprinted from SA NEWS, Vol 4, No.2, August 13-27, 1992

Rene Caisse was a nurse living in Canada who for a period of almost 60 years treated hundreds of people with an herbal remedy she called ESSIAC. She discovered this remedy through a patient in the hospital where she worked who had been cured of cancer. The patient had used an herbal remedy given her by an Ojibway herbalist.

Rene left the hospital in 1922 at age 33,and went to Bracebridge, Ontario, Canada where she began administering ESSIAC to all who came to her. The majority of those whom she treated came on referral with letters from their physicians verifying they had incurable or terminal forms of cancer and that they had been given up by the medical profession as untreatable.

Rene began gathering the plants and preparing the herbal remedy herself in her own kitchen, in a building lent her for her patients. She administered ESSIAC both orally and by injection. In cases where there was severe damage to life support organs, her patients died - but they lived far longer than the medical profession had predicted, and, more significantly, they lived free of pain. Still others, listed as hopeless and terminal, but without severe damage to life support organs, were cured and lived 35-45 years (many are still living).

So startling was the effectiveness of this simple herbal remedy, it could not be ignored, and the Canadian Ministry of Health and Welfare and Parliament became involved. Friends, former patients, and grateful families petitioned Canadian officialdom for Rene Caisse's right to administer the remedy to anyone who asked for it without the threat of interference from authorities. Fifty five thousand signatures were collected on the petition. In 1938, ESSIAC came within three votes of being legalized by the Ontario government as a remedy for terminal cancer patients.

The story of Rene Caisse, her life, her work, and the effectiveness of the remedy she named ESSIAC, is told in a book Sun Bear received, Calling of an Angel, By Dr. Gary L.Glum of Los Angeles. Dr. Glum, until two years ago, was a chiropractor with offices in Los Angeles, California. His clients included well known professional athletic teams and Olympic teams. He published Calling of an Angel in 1988. Two years ago he closed his practice and now devotes his time to investigative writing.

After reading the book and finding it to be informative, well documented and moving, I decided to interview Dr. Glum. I verified the basic information in his book through Canadian sources, one an herbalist who knows of Rene Caisse and her work and who has personally made and successfully used ESSIAC.

Elisabeth Robinson: To begin with, Dr. Glum, can you tell us a little about how you became interested in the story you tell in Calling of an Angel, and how you learned about Rene Caisse and her work.

Dr. Gary Glum: A personal friend of mine knew this woman, whose name I have promised not to reveal, who was living in Detroit, Michigan. Twenty years ago she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer in a Detroit hospital where she was eventually given up as incurable and terminal. She was given about ten days to live.

She convinced her husband to make a trip to Bracebridge, Canada where she went to see Rene Caisse. She was treated with the herbal remedy developed by Rene - ESSIAC - and in a short time she didn't have a cancer cell in her body. So after that time this woman began dedicating her life to disseminating information about ESSIAC in the United States. When I met her, she was the only person in possession of the original herbal formula who would relinquish it. I got the formula for ESSIAC from her. That's how it began. All I had was a piece of paper. I thought, what am I going to do with this? I decided the best way to go would be to find the information behind ESSIAC and put it in a book form and bring it to the world.

I learned about Rene Caisse from Mary McPherson, who was a very close personal friend of Rene's - not only a friend but also a patient. Mary's mother and her husband were also patients. They were all treated for cancer and cured by Rene.

Mary worked with Rene beginning in the 1930's and she had in her possession all these documents that had to do with ESSIAC over the 40 years Rene administered it. All the documents Rene had were destroyed by the Canadian Ministry of Health and Welfare at the time of her death in 1978. They burned all that information in 55 - gallon drums behind her home.

ER: Why?

GG: Because they don't want this information in the hands of the public or the press or anybody else. They indeed found out what ESSIAC was in 1937. The Royal Cancer Commission hearings had then come to the same conclusion that Rene had - that ESSIAC was a cure for cancer.

ER: What is ESSIAC exactly?

GG: ESSIAC is a non-toxic herbal cure for cancer that's been with us since 1922, It's a formula made from four very common herbs.

ER: I would guess that virtually every person in the U.S. today has been touched by cancer, either personally or through a loved one. If this information is true, and the effectiveness of this remedy is actually medically documented, many lives could be saved. Why do you think the information on ESSIAC is not more widely known?

GG: The information is withheld because cancer is the second largest revenue producing business in the world, next to the petrochemical business. Money and power suppress this truth.

No one has ever sought to cure cancer - only to control it. I mean the research institutes, federal governments, pharmaceutical companies, anybody that has a vested interest in the health care of cancer, including the American Cancer Society, The Canadian Cancer Society, any of these stalled benefactors to those who have contracted this disease - all of these institutions are involved in the money and power around cancer.

These institutions have influence over government and regulatory agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA recommends only allopathic treatments for cancer and other life threatening diseases. It doesn't approve or make legal alternative treatments of any kind.

ER: In your book you mention that the Brusch Clinic in Massachusetts worked with Rene Caisse and with ESSIAC, during the early 1960's. Is this clinic still doing research with ESSIAC?

GG: Dr. Charles A. Brusch is not practicing at this time. He was a personal physician to the late President John F. Kennedy. Dr. Brusch worked with Rene Caisse from 1959 to 1962. He worked with the Presidential Cancer Commission, with others like Dr. Armand Hammer, the American Cancer society, and the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Brusch presented his findings after ten years of research. He had come to the conclusion that, in his own words, "ESSIAC is a cure for cancer, period. All studies done at laboratories in the United States and Canada support this conclusion."

Whereupon the federal government issued a gag order and said, "You've got one of two choices, either you keep quiet about this or we'll haul you off to military prison and you'll never be heard of again." So we never heard another word out of him.

Brusch's ESSIAC patients included Ted Kennedy's son, who had a sarcoma in his leg and who had his leg amputated, He was being treated at that time by the Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. Farber didn't know how to save him, because no one had ever lived with this type of sarcoma. So what he did was go to Dr. Brusch and say, how are we going to save Ted Kennedy's son? And Dr. Brusch made the suggestion to put him on ESSIAC and after they did he didn't have a cancer cell in his body. But all this information has been hidden from the general public.

ER: Why?

GG: As I said, money and power.

ER: Do you know whether the remedy is being used or tested anywhere today in the U.S. or Canada?

GG: Right now ESSIAC is being used in every state in the United States, it's throughout Canada, into Mexico, it's in Australia, Europe, Asia and recently, also in Africa. So the message of ESSIAC is beginning to make its way worldwide. But it's still known only on a very limited basis.

Of course now you have the problem of herbal distributing companies throughout the world that are substituting yellow dock and curly dock for sheep's sorrel., which is one of the critical ingredients in ESSIAC.

The sheep's sorrel is the herbal ingredient that was found to be responsible for the destruction of cancer cells in the body, or their amalgamation where metastasized cancer cells actually return to the original tumor site.

That research was done by Dr. Chester Stock at Sloan-Kettering in New York for over a three year period. But when they gathered that information, they withheld it from the general public - yet they gave it of the Canadian Ministry of Health and Welfare. The Canadian government then immediately banned that herb for sale and distribution.

ER: Banned a common weed like sheep's sorrel?

GG: Yes, sheep's sorrel is just a common weed that grows in abundance throughout North America and into Canada. A common weed.

ER: Well, it seems that banning sheep's sorrel would not be very effective if you could identify it for yourself.

GG: Yes, it's just a question of identifying the plant and then harvesting it correctly and drying it properly and then putting it together with the other herbs.

Rene would harvest the sheep's sorrel - (Rumex acetosella) - when it was four to six inches high. she cut it back and it would grow up again, and she'd cut it back again about three times and then she would let it go to seed. It will grow to 14 or 18 inches.

She would take the herb cuttings home and lay them out at room temperature to dry them. She'd let the cuttings sit there for three or four days before she'd begin turning the herbs. Then she'd turn them every two days until they were properly dry, which took about ten days to two weeks. It takes about a bushel of harvested sheep's sorrel to produce one pound of the dried powdered herb which is used in the formula.

ER: Do you have the formula? It's not in your book. You do mention a video in the book.

GG: Yes, I have it. Anyone can get it from me, free of charge. We don't sell the video anymore. We simply mail the formula to anyone who asks for it

ER: Sun Bear told me you had problems getting the book published and distributed. What kind of problems?

GG: There wasn't a publishing company that would publish it. No one wanted to run the risk of a wrongful death suit. So I published it myself. And as soon as I did, the IRS came in and slapped about a half million dollars in tax liens against me and said, "You know this has got nothing to do with taxes. It's all about cancer." They actually started hauling pallets of books out of my medical practice offices and confiscating them.. I also had thousands of books confiscated by the Canadian government at customs. I have never received any of those books back. The only ones I have now are hidden in storage.

ER: Explain, "The publishers fearing a wrongful death suit"?

GG: What you're dealing with is giving people a formula that they can make and use in the privacy of their own homes without the approval of the AMA or FDA or anybody else. If any attorney or any family member should decide, for whatever reason, that the reason someone expired was from the use of ESSIAC , then you are putting yourself up for a wrongful death suit. The contention is that if it isn't approved by the Food and Drug Administration, there's no legality in using it when you're dealing with a life-threatening disease.

When Rene Caisse set up her clinical trials in Canada to test ESSIAC, she was given government permission to treat terminally ill cancer patients who had been given up for hopeless by the medical profession. That was one criteria. Secondly, this was all to be certified by a pathology report. And third, she could not charge anything for her services. She agreed to all these criteria and proceeded to treat people with ESSIAC. Many she treated were still there 35 years later to bury her when she died at age 90.

The best that anyone can do is just try to disseminate this information to the public and let people make their own choices. That's all you can do. And just say, look, if you feel that ESSIAC has value in your life and the lives of your loved ones, you have the right to make this remedy and use it in the privacy of your own home and without anyone's approval.

ER: Have you had any personal experience with ESSIAC?

GG: Yes, I can give you an example. He was a twelve year old boy named Toby Wood. He had acute lymphoblastic, which is one of the most virulent of all leukemias.

He had been on chemotherapy for four years and radiation for three. His mother's only hope on life was to find a cure for him. She went everywhere. She tried every alternative treatment.

Her last stop was Dr. Alvazados in Athens, Greece where her son's white cell count was 186,000. He had no red blood cells and no platelets. He was hemorrhaging to death. so they transfused Toby in Greece and put him on a plane to Alaska where he was given less than five days to live

I met his mother's sister in Los Angeles while I was putting the book together and she asked if there was any credibility here. We sat down and talked. She then borrowed the money for a flight to Anchorage, and delivered a bottle of ESSIAC. By the time she got there Toby was given three days to live. He was in a state of complete deterioration. He was given the ESSIAC and all the hemorrhaging stopped within 24 hours. Within three months all his blood tests were normal. I arrived in Alaska later that year and met him.

Toby Wood did die, and we finally found a pathologist who would do an exhaustive autopsy. We knew that he didn't have leukemia anymore. We wanted to find out what was the cause of death. It took four months to get the report back. The pathologist autopsied the brain, testicles, and all life support organs, including the bone marrow. No blast cells were found in any life support organ. No blast cells were found in the bone marrow. There were a few stray cells in the testicles and in the brain. Cause of death was damage to the myocardialsac of the heart, a result of the chemotherapy.

This was the first report anywhere in medical history of anyone surviving lymphoblastic leukemia. That information was taken to AP and UPI but they said it was not news worthy.

Our information on ESSIAC has been sent around the world twice through Publisher's Weekly magazine in a huge two page ad. We received no responses at all from any publishing company worldwide, no producers, directors, throughout the United States, no talk show programs, none of that. We can't access the media. In fact we talked to Philip Scheffler, producer of "60 minutes". He read the book and we called him to ask what he was going to do about it. He said, nothing. I said, all the information in the book is verifiable. In other words, it's the truth. I said, if you're "60Minutes," why don;t you expose me and ESSIAC as a fraud. He said, nope, can't do it.

We took it to Joe Donally, who's the executive news producer for ABC in New York. We said why not give it to Peter Jennings, Geraldo Rivera, Ted Koppel, one of those. He said nope. We asked why not. He said because his phone lines would be invaded with 65,000 phone calls. We said, how sympathetic do you think a parent whose child is dying of leukemia would be to your 65,000 phone calls. He went on to say he's got a mortgage on his house and he's looking toward retirement.

So that's the problem. No one wants this information disseminated, and it's not just the media, either. It includes the herbal companies who are now substituting the curly dock for sheep's sorrel. So people are getting the wrong ingredients for ESSIAC, not to mention the five of six other formulas that are circulating which are different from the one I send out. These false formulas are being disseminated. There is a disinformation campaign going on here, somehow.

ER: Has this disinformation campaign started just since your book has been out?

GG: Previous to my book, none of this information was available to the general public. The public had no information outside of a few assorted articles. Certainly the ESSIAC formula was not available to the general public. That information was held by the Resperin Corporation in Toronto, Canada, which is a private institution.

However, they work with the Canadian Ministry of Health and Welfare, which works with the American FDA and the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The ESSIAC formula was never given to anyone by Resperin.

ER: It's beginning to seem amazing to me that any information at all about this remedy has survived the "conspiracy of silence," or outright destruction of records and so on.

GG: The only reason ESSIAC is known today is by word of mouth and because ESSIAC is what it is. What will keep ESSIAC known is its effectiveness. Rene said it years ago. She said, look, if ESSIAC doesn't have any merit, it will kill itself. Of course she knew full well if people had the correct herbs, the remedy would stand on its own. And that is exactly what ESSIAC has done over this period of time that we've been disseminating the information.

Rene also found that ESSIAC was a strong preventive, These findings were substantiated by Dr. Albert Schatz at Temple Univrersity who discovered the cure for Tuberculosis.

Rene also found that ESSIAC would normalize the thyroid gland. My wife was on two grains of thyroid since the sixth grade. After I met her, she started taking ESSIAC, and she hasn't taken a grain since.

Rene also found that ESSIAC would heal stomach ulcers within three or four weeks. She felt that ulcers were a precursor to cancer.

Sir Frederick Banting, the co-discover of insulin, wanted to work with Rene. She had clinical cases where a person on insulin discontinued it with the ESSIAC. No one knew how ESSIAC would interact with the insulin. Apparently ESSIAC regulated the pancreas in cases of diabetes mellitus. So these people then became insulin free.

Another thing I've found with ESSIAC is that I've experienced almost perfect health. As you get older you think, well, I'm forty now, these things happen. Well, these things don't have to happen. Since I've taken ESSIAC, it's amazing, I sleep like a baby, have all kinds of energy, and no sickness, not even a cold of the flu.

I also worked with the AIDS Project Los Angeles through their Long Beach and San Pedro districts, They had sent 179 patients home to die. They all had pneumocystis carinii and histoplasmosis. Their weight was down to about 100 pounds. Their T-4 cell counts were less than ten. The Project gave me five of these patients. I took them off the AZT and the DDI and put them on ESSIAC three times a day. Those are the only ones alive today. The other 174 are dead.

ER: That is incredible, but what kind of lives are they leading today?

GG: They're exercising three times a day, eating three meals a day. Their weight is back to normal. for all intents and purposes you wouldn't know they were sick a day in their lives. But this information is not being disseminated either, because AIDS is on the horizon as another big moneymaker. The chairman of the AIDS project in Los Angeles makes over $100,000 a year.

The alternative people are also into it for the money. What you're finding with ESSIAC is that it is not even allowed into the arenas of alternative health care. So really what you've got out here is people continually perpetrating these lies against mankind. For money. For money and power. It's that simple.

ER: So, in your own personal experience, this herbal remedy works to - I'm going to just quote you here and say "cure" cancer, thyroid conditions, diabetes, AIDS,ulcers,,,

GG: It also cures the common cold. ESSIAC elevates the immune system. I've been taking one ounce a day for seven years, and in seven years I haven't had a cold, flu or virus.

ER: And all of this from a simple Native herbal remedy?

GG: Yes. Although Rene did alter it. She altered it with Turkish rhubarb root (Rheum palmatum). Turkish rhubarb has a 5,000 year history. It actually came up from India into China and then was taken by the British.

ER: Turkish rhubarb root certainly is not native in this country, nor available here. Herbals from foreign countries are fumigated and irradiated, so is it a good idea to use the Turkish rhubarb?

GG: You can substitute ordinary rhubarb root. The other two ingredients are burdock root (Arctium lappa) and the inner bark of slippery elm (Jlmus fulva). They are easy to obtain, usually. Sheep's sorrel, (Rumex acetosella), is what destroys the cancer cells. The other three herbs are blood purifiers.

ESSIAC elevates the enzyme system and gives all cancer patients and all AIDS patients the enzymes that have been destroyed. ESSIAC elevates the enzyme system; it elevates the hormone system, which elevates the immune system, so the body can cure its own disease.

ER: What about quantities? Some herbals are toxic.

GG: Even it's worst enemy could never lay claim that ESSIAC had any deleterious side effects whatever. You can take ESSIAC safely, through all the clinical trials that have been done, up to six ounces a day. That's two ounces in the evening, two in the morning and two around noontime. That's a high dosage, Rene had the correct herbs and she used as little as one ounce a week.

But look at the difference between then and now. The food didn't have carcinogens in it, and neither did the water, nor the air. So what have we done? We've killed the air, killed the water, killed the food. So, what's left?

Nationwide in the water we drink over 2100 organic and inorganic chemicals have been identified, and 156 of them are pure carcinogens. Of those, if you have a tumor, 26 are tumor promoting so they make the tumor larger. But of course this information is not available to the public either. Those figures are from tests conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency which have never been distributed to the public.

ER: How did you get the information?

GG: From a Ralph Nader organization out of Washington, DC. The media has not disseminated this information. Another problem is that very few people read books any more. We can only hope they all read Calling of an Angel. Of course, the problem right now is people getting the right herbs.

ER: Anything you'd like to add before we close this interview?

GG: I was the first person to release this information on ESSIAC, how to make it, to the general public and say, here it is, here's the formula, here's the story. so now the story is out there and look what's happening - it's getting killed through a disinformation campaign. I mean Harvard, Temple, Tufts, Northwestern University, Chicago - all these institutions have tested ESSIAC with the right stuff, and they have all came to the same conclusions as Rene Caisse. But all that information has been buried.

ER: Gary, it's been very interesting to speak with you.

GG: It's been a pleasure. You're opening a Pandora's Box, you know, publishing this interview.

ER: I think you're the one who's done that. Would you tell people how to get your book and the information on ESSIAC?

GG: They simply call me in California at (310) 271-9931. The book is $35. The formula is free.

This article originally appeared in Wildfire Magazine,

Volume 6, No. 1; reprinted with permission

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