In 1922, nurse Rene Caisse of Haileybury, Ontario, noticed a female patient with a severely scarred and disfigured breast.  Asking the woman about her scars, Rene was told an amazing story of how years earlier the woman had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Toronto doctors had told the woman she must have her breast removed immediately. However, in desperation, the woman turned to a more natural route that had been told to her by an Ojibwa Indian medicine man. 

The Indian medicine man told her of a combination of herbs to brew into a tea and drink daily. He told her this would cure the cancer in her breast and not require it to be removed.  She did as the medicine man instructed and as she sat telling  Rene the story many years later, she obviously had not had the  surgery and yet she had no recurrence of the cancer!

Rene asked the patient for the formula for the tea and wrote it down but never really pursued making it. A few years later when her aunt was diagnosed with inoperable cancer,  Rene began giving the tea to her aunt.  After two months of  drinking the tea daily, Rene’s aunt rallied and lived an  additional 21 years with no recurrence of cancer just as the lady with breast cancer had done!

In her desire to help the sick, Rene then began to give the  tea to others with wonderful results. People with various kinds of cancer, diabetes and more seemed to improve with the use of this tea. Rene decided the unique combination of these  particular herbs somehow seemed to cause the different organs in the body to "normalize" helping the body's own immune  system to fight and "correct" whatever  was wrong. 

This amazing formula, made up only four simple herbs, is  believed to normalize body systems by cleansing the blood,  purging toxic build up, promoting cell repair and aiding in  effective assimilation and elimination.  While incredibly  simple, when combined with each other, these four herbs and  their separate individual effects are greatly enhanced.

Rene decided to called this tea "Essiac" which was her last name spelled backwards. As time went on, Rene Caisse continued to "treat" those considered terminally ill with  very positive results. Health officials vacillated back and forth  between a love/hate attitude toward her. While she never  openly claimed the tea would cure ALL cancers it did seem  to have a definite effect on many and it undeniably promoted  wellness, general good health and strengthened the immune 
system.

Rene's desire was to make the tea available to everyone. She operated a Cancer Treatment Clinic in Canada using her Essiac Tea for many years, never charging for her services.  Rene used the herbal tea herself everyday and finally died in
1978 at the age of 90.

Her desire was never for financial gain but rather that the formula for this old Indian herbal tea could be used to help mankind.  Rene did not want to "sell" her formula to drug  companies since she did not want it to get tied up  in beauracratic "red tape" or "shelved" and  discredited like so many other "natural" remedies. However, as she grew old, she finally sold the rights to this formula for  only $1. She did this hoping the tea could be developed and made easily available to the public. Now many  companies are using the four herb tea combination formula  and are marketing it under different versions of the original  name.