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Nurse Rene Caisse and the "birth" of essiac teaRene Caisse (pronounced "REEN CASE") is one of the more interesting people to come out of Canada in the Twentieth Century, but most folks have never heard of her, or even of the herbal tea that she named essiac. This unassuming Canadian nurse stumbled upon a natural herbal formula that she claimed helped people suffering from cancer, yet she took no money for it and died a relative unknown.Rene gave hope to many who had none by continuing to provide essiac for them, even under great duress. 
Nurse Rene Caisse never wrote an autobiography. She did, however, write a small booklet entitled "I Was Canada's Cancer Nurse" which was published in the seventies and can still be purchased in Canada and online. She also wrote a brief biography of her family and their settlement in Bracebridge (her hometown). In the 1920s a chance encounter with a prospector's wife who had survived breast cancer introduced Rene Caisse to the healing power of essiac herbs. The woman told Nurse Caisse of a recipe for an herbal tea that had been given to her by a Native American medicine man, and Rene decided that if she ever had to treat her own cancer, she would try it herself. Soon, she got her chance when her aunt was diagnosed with cancer. Nurse Caisse treated her aunt with essiac, and soon she was cancer-free, from what everyone could tell. In Rene’s own words: “my aunt lived for 21 years after being given up by the medical profession. There was no recurrence of cancer. Dr. Fisher was so impressed he asked me to use the treatment on some of his other hopeless cancer cases. Other doctors heard about me from Dr. Fisher and asked me to treat patients for them after everything medical science had to offer had failed. They too were impressed with the results.” Soon Rene had opened a clinic in Bracebridge, where desperate patients came from all around to be treated with essiac. Nurse Caisse survived on donations from these patients, refusing to charge for her treatments. Even before she opened the clinic, most doctors viewed Nurse Caisse with skepticism. With the clinic now open, the medical establishment attacked and worried her for years and years. In fact, she spent much of her life defending herself against the government. Nurse Rene Caisse spent most of her career defending herself against the medical and government establishment. She believed she was never sent to prison only because of the “common folk’s” support for her clinic, and the fact that she had such well-known and reported success stories. Watch a rarely-seen documentary on Essiac and Rene Caisse, filmed in the 70's.
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