W elcome to Herbal Balance for Life.

Essiac can be traced back many generations to Eastern Ontario Canada. It was used by the Ojibwa native Indians as a cure for multiple ailments from fever, swelling, intestinal ailments even to treat wounds. Essiac was a combination of four herbs, ground together in a specific ratio, then boiled in water and administered as a tea, to be taken over a period of time.

In the early 1920's, a woman suffering from breast cancer, could not afford medical treatment for surgery and was given this herbal recipe. Within a few months the tumors disappeared and she reported this incident to a local nurse, Rene Caisse. Rene Caisse worked with cancer patients along with a Dr. R.O Fischer in Canada. She was given this formula and began to administer it to terminally ill cancer patients under her care. These patients were in various stages of cancer and many of them became better and left the hospital to lead full lives free of cancer.

Rene Caisse became known as the "Cancer nurse of Canada" and she spent the rest of her life testing and refining this four herb formula to make it more effective and to yield better results. She named the product Essiac, as this was her name spelled backwards.

Later in life, she met with Dr,. Charles Brusch and that was in 1959. Dr. Brusch was a noted research scientist and also the personal physician to President John F. Kennedy. Dr. Brusch invited Nurse Caisse to come to his Medical Research Center in Cambridge, MA. to assist him in further research on how to improve Essiac. These two spent the next eight years working on this project and finally settling on a revised formula that included the original 4 herbs but by adding 4 new herbs, they found it enhanced the formula substantially. These new additional herbs augmented and modified the properties of the original 4 herbs. It is this eight herb formula, which improves and enhances the original formula and according to Dr. Brusch, "yield the best results" that we are making available to our customers.