Healing From the Inside Out: The Essiac Tea Story

Welcome to the Wellness Sherpa podcast, where we engage with passionate leaders, holistic thinkers, and disruptors who courageously share their personal journey, mission, and wisdom with you. Together, we create a safe space to empower you to live your best, most vital life. Thanks for being here. Well, I am really excited to have you here, Brian, because I actually was a user of SEAC-T back during the— I don't know if you know, this, I had stage 4 cancer in 2015.

Oh my.

And, and did mostly natural healing, and Essiac tea was one of the things I utilized. Now, the source that I utilized, we're going to talk about that today.

Of course.

But really excited to have Brian Paulus here, and you've got a really interesting story. Um, I went to your site and watched some of your videos, and I, I love that you're passionate about Essiac tea, and we're going to talk about what the heck is it if people haven't heard of it. And, and how the heck did you get into this? So thank you for being here, for saying yes.

Thank you. I appreciate being here. Yes.

Yeah. So let's just start with the basics so that somebody who's not familiar with Essiac tea, what is it? Where did it come from? And then the third question is, how did you get involved in this?

Yeah, well, we'll start with the what is it. It is an 8-herb formula that used to consist of 4 herbs, but it was Through 8 years of research, it was advanced in its effectiveness to an 8-herb formula, and that was done right near us in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But the origins are the Ojibwe Indians. They literally, over, you know, many thousands of years, would, you know, test the herbs to see if they had any medicinal value. So if you were going to the origins there, the origin of this Which was in the beginning a 4-herb formula. And this started to basically come to, you know, to be widely distributed in Canada in 1924 as a result of what happened in 1922. There was a nurse in Canada. She was doing her rounds. She noticed a woman that had a small lesion on her breast, asked what it was, and she got basically was surprised to learn that this lady who had exhausted conventional treatment had no means of treating it and was basically going to die. And back in those days in Canada, they had less of a division. They used to go from alternative to, you know, conventional treatments. So it wasn't unusual to go to, you know, a medicine man, so to speak. And she did. And so she tried this 4-herb formula. Her breast cancer tumor basically receded and left a small lesion as a result of it, and it was just enough to be noticeable but nothing dramatic. And she said, I used the 4-herb formula. So she wrote down this formula that she received from this medicine man and put it in her drawer, didn't do anything with it till 1924, which is 2 years later. Her aunt developed cancer, it was stage 4, and she decided to try it on her and did not do any conventional treatment, just utilized the Essiac, and she went into remission and lived 17 more years cancer-free. So that started her on this, oh my goodness, what are we going to do with this now? She's a nurse, perfectly positioned to do something about this. So she started a clinic in Bracebridge, Ontario, That served people from initially just regionally, and then they came from all corners of Canada. They came there to be treated, and this had such a— just an astounding success rate that they petitioned the Canadian government to have this approved as a means of treatment. And unfortunately, it failed by 3 votes. And that, you would think, would be a bad thing, but it turned out to be a great thing in the long run because of the advancement of the formula as a result.

Yeah.

After it failed, she was left high and dry. She couldn't distribute it like she did before. So she was connected to a man here in the United States who was President Kennedy's personal physician, Dr. Charles Bruch. He was the president's physician before the White House, during the White House years, and he was highly regarded for his research center, which is— which was in Cambridge, as I said, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, right near us. That is where there was a team of 18 scientists that started with each of the individual ingredients, assessed first of all safety.

These are the 4, the original 4 ingredients?

The original 4. That's what they started with because you have to have the baseline in order to improve upon this. So they started with which herbs had a threshold of safety because, you know, you need to know with what parameters you can work with it. So they established safety levels, they established individual herbs and their medicinal properties and looked at that formula. And okay, they assessed these 4 herbs work at this rate. And now there was room for improvement in spite of the fact that many people had been treated with this and gotten well. Wherever there's human life, the need to improve, it's got to be researched. And so many people had benefited from the 4-Herb Formula, but what if you could hypothetically at the time improve it so that there was a much lesser degree of failure? And so that's what they did. And over the course of 18 scientists, excuse me, they worked on this for 8 years. And what they did is they would look at individual potential herbs that could improve upon this. They would see if these herbs had any merit. If they didn't have any merit, they'd cast it aside. If they if it had merit, they'd try to include it. And what they would do is add it again, seeing the the safety threshold of that herb, add it in to see if they could add another herb that had potential, tweak the formula, add, tweak, add, tweak. And so they really that's quite a tedious process with all the you know the the options of all these herbs being introduced. Eventually, they got. The four abs, the added herbs that we have now are the byproduct of that eight years of tweaking and adding. They got the optimal results with one particular formula that had eight herbs, and that's what they stuck with. And so, as a result of that, you know, they had a research center, and right next to the research center, one of the people that had a fish market near us one day. He had extra fish at the pier. He packed it with ice. And this was way back when. And he went— this is 1960s. He went down to the Boston area to find out if there was a market to sell his fish. And he ended up saying, this is a great place to sell fish. I'll open one in Cambridge right next to the research center.

Hmm.

So as you can imagine, how did I get connected? It was through that man that had the fish market near us and the one near the research center. He became friends with Rienke's, friends with Dr. Brooch. So when my mother's boyfriend's mother had pancreatic cancer in 1986, or early 1986, she passed away, you know, I think it was August. He came back after being absent because of his mother, and he went to the fish market because he was a fisherman who would drop off the fish you know, supply. They said, we're very sorry to hear about your mother, but we have this thing called SEA-CT. And he initially, you know, just received this information without any judgment, came back, told all of us. We started to tell people. We told 2 people initially that inevitably did go to this fish market, and they tried it. And about 7 or 8 months later, we ran into both of them. And they were both in remission without any conventional treatment. So we were, as you can understand, shocked beyond belief. So we told the world. We were like, oh my gosh, this actually worked. So we told everyone because who wouldn't have that news and spread it? And these people, of course, experiencing it, they did the same thing. They told the world. And this was when the whole region would go to the fish market in order to get this Essiac tea. Now, by that time, it was the 8-herb formula, the advanced formula. And, the problem with that is they're trying to run a business being inundated with people that wanted Essiac tea who had questions. So, inevitably, they asked us, could you please do this separate from our business? Could you do it? So, we did it out of the house, which became incredibly inconvenient because we experienced what they did. people coming and going at all hours of the day. And that had to be consolidated into one particular time. So we had a support group using Essiac tea. That support group had a few people that were connected to a television station in New Hampshire, WMUR. They had a talk show called The Kathy Burnham Show. And they inevitably had these people that went into remission on the show. But they didn't just have these people that went into remission. The 2 that were connected, they filled the audience. They filled the panel. My mother was on the panel. So we were watching this and the excitement of watching a family member and finally, you know, we're watching all this happen, but we were so naive, we didn't think about what would follow. There was a massive surge of calls to the television station, 1,500 to be exact. And we had no massive production ability. We were serving a relatively small unit of people. So we panicked and we had to talk to Dr. Brusch, talk to his friend, uh, Arthur was his name, and say, how do we do this? So Arthur, Dr. Brusch, and I, we got together, got the machinery, the, the scales, everything. And Dr. Brusch, because we had a high-volume distribution now, I had to lift heavy, heavy things, and they were elderly men and So I was enlisted to really help with the physical task and learning how to assemble this for them. So I thought this was going to be a, you know, a summertime type of thing, and I would do it for a few weeks and that would be it. And that was 19— you know, by then it was 1992. My initial introduction to it was 1986, but it really came to a head in 1992 from the television show. And That started this— no advertising, no anything, just growth, growth, growth. And then the internet became the next thing.

I was gonna say, this was all pre-internet. I mean, so that's amazing.

Yeah, we were a little slow to budge on the internet. Uh, late 2004, we went on the internet, and, uh, I remember my wife saying, oh my God, they're actually buying, like, today. Like, we didn't know. We didn't know that this would happen. And as it turns out, the successes of this are really— they're remarkable. And this is not because it is dealing with cancer, it's because it's getting you healthy enough to deal with it. So the health benefits are extraordinary outside of dealing with cancer. Yeah.

So let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. Generalized health is really what this does and what, as best explained by Dr. Barouch, and I had the great opportunity to pick His brain. And turns out that decades later, everything he talked about is in fact true and proven to be true. He was decades ahead of his time. He basically explained to me that a lot of health issues are essentially ingestion of things that our ancestors never would have imagined eating, you know, dyes, chemicals, so on. And what happens is you get to the digestive level of the intestinal walls and What happens now is your body doesn't know what to do with these, these particular items. So you'll get it to a perforation in the intestines. Your body just says, I don't know what to do with this. It leaves it there. Then the next time you have to digest, if that blockage is there, it can't go through that perforation. The function of absorption and expelling waste doesn't take place. That kind of cascades to the next perforations around it. And then that blockage continues to exponentially get worse. So what we're finding is that the amount of toxic layering of waste product and chemical, you know, chemicals and dyes on the intestinal walls is compromising your ability to absorb nutrients and eliminate properly, which is obviously essential to overall health. So what this does that's different from other things is that A lot of people will sell you a very acute, fast-acting detoxifying detoxifying product. You'll take it for a week or two, but it can't be sustained because you know you'll you'll go to the bathroom so frequently you'll have no life. You'll get dehydration, which causes in some cases nausea. You'll have headaches. But they think, okay, I did it for a week. I went to the bathroom this week, you know, like eighty times and. I must be done. And they don't realize what they've just done is the first step, but they are far away from completing the process. That first step is to get all available loose, you know, stool and waste product out of the body. And I always use the analogy of a frying pan when you cook eggs. You know, the majority can be taken out in 3 seconds. You take the spatula, you scoop it out, and seconds later you're about 90% Through your task as far as getting rid of the eggs. But if the main goal is that you want to get that pan clean, you've got to address the last remaining stuck-on 3% that's burnt on there. So you soak it, you, you get the, you know, the detergent, steel wool, you really got to go at it. And the same is true with this because it is a moderate, you know, intestinal cleanse. It's kind of the long game versus the short attempt which fails. You take this every day. Initially, about 25% of the people will experience some loose stools, higher degree of going, you know, to the bathroom the first few days. Again, it's only about 25% because it's very moderate in its approach. You don't have significant hurts reactions or anything like that. You just have that. And it's understandable because it's doing what it's supposed to. Then after you have that happen, Your body self-regulates. It goes into a consistent expelling of the intestinal waste. Now, these ingredients have such incredible things like the slippery elm used for healing the digestive tract.

Mm-hmm.

Also has a gelatinous substance which helps to pull out some of the, you know, the loosened up stuff that you'll find on the intestinal walls. Now, some of these herbs are really essential to be ingested Because when you ingest the herbs, and to just ingest anything, it has to be in a very fine powder. And so what the Ojibwe Indians would do is they would literally get grinding stones, grind it up to pulverize it, considered it as everything else that was being utilized as a gift from God. They would use the entire animal, you know, whether it be antlers, tendons, skins. Same thing with this. This was a gift from God meant to be ingested. Not— they didn't get their strainers out and throw it away.

Right.

Ingested it to honour the gift. And so what they didn't, you know, what they knew but people don't realize now is the ingestion of the herbs in their entirety. There's still some medicinal property after being brewed, about 15 to 20% of the medicinal properties still in there. Most of the extraction takes place during the brewing, but it still merits the inclusion of the herbs and the fiber content going through there with some of the particular aspects of each ingredient pulling and drawing out these toxins. Also, they don't allow for these forever chemicals to then also be, you know, absorbed in, you know, into the intestinal lining. It's like a protective barrier. So it eliminates, pulls, and prevents. And over the course of 4.5 to 6 months, this is a very Hard, you know, 3%, so to speak, of toxic buildup. It takes one sweep through, another sweep through, 3 times a day. Inevitably, you achieve about 4.5 to 6 months, you'll achieve a pristine intestinal wall.

Okay. So just, I wanna ask some clarifying questions. So this is working on the gut and the gut lining and cleaning up the gut. That's really where it's going. So it's not necessarily working on liver and kidneys and other organs. It's really focused on—

No, no, that's That's not it at all. It does as a result of this. So what you're going to find, and some of these things do have the prebiotics elements to it, and these are all in the herbs as well. So you're talking about gut health. I primarily focused on the intestinal health, but it does all. These are the benefits of this. So you have these, how do the organs benefit? Well, the organs benefit because this sludge, it's like a sludge that gets absorbed into the bloodstream via the intestinal walls. It's always leaching in. And where it goes, it's like a contaminated river. It'll eventually dam up somewhere. Where it meets resistance is an organ or a gland.

Okay.

You know, so you'll find— or joint. So you'll find that's where it collects.

And it goes to the weak spot in the body, right?

It's inevitably going to collect somewhere, you know. And, and so what happens when you get that— and it was fascinating to talk to Dr. Bruce— he said that when you have a toxic element, your body adaptively will grow a tumor, but it's meant to be very small because you're not supposed to be ingesting that much toxicity. It'll grow the tumor, the tumor will then make essentially Capture this element, send out a beacon of chemical signaling to the white blood cells, and that it'll be able to you know be identified and located in the bloodstream because the white blood cells receive the chemical signaling and they go towards it. They invade it. They break it up naturally. But what's happened now is we are this soot, for lack of better words, is is so present in the bloodstream that once you have a a tumor, for example, this soot will develop and encase the tumor before it has a chance to complete the signaling process, like an eggshell. Now, the continuance of that will contribute to the tumor growing, and it creates essentially a wall of resistance as well, because the defense cells of a tumor, for example, will live in the byproduct of the waste of that tumor. And they strength— they're strengthened by the substance that it emits. And so you're looking at all these things in terms of what you're trying to inevitably get to. And I've taken the long path to this, but this is where you are. When you have pristine blood and you have the ability of the intestinal walls to function, while you're always making new blood, you're no longer having the flow of blood being contaminated and you have a clean bloodstream. It is as God designed. And that's where you go, oh my gosh! Now what's flowing through all the organs? Clean blood. So things inevitably dissipate, and for lack of better words, they they they are eliminated from the organs, from the glands, because everything that is flowing through is clean. So the massive thing that we get from people is they you know they talk whether or not they're dealing with any particular health issue is an overall sense of. Strength of constitution, feeling better. And so we've since then had that question and really, you know, delved into what else is happening. And we've had a research study, preclinical study that had to do with mice. A man contacted me; he wanted to do the study. I supplied the herbs. He's like, "We can't get the mice sick when we try to radiate these mice to grow tumors." and to test their DNA damage. They're actually healthier while drinking Essiac tea than the mice that are drinking water with no exposure to radiation. And so we presented that in Canada in 2019. We also had a study dealing with low-dose radiation and DNA damage as well there. And so they were all X-ray technicians who had low-dose radiation as part of their job. they were given the Essiac tea and everyone had between a 33 to 50% reduction in DNA damage. And there's also another study you can find on PubMed that has the same assertion that this has a massive DNA repair. So what you're looking at is not only stopping the damage but repairing the damage.

Right.

And that is essential. Your, your body is designed to operate in a pristine way without this. And so You're going to find that a clean bloodstream is the key, and clean gut health are the key to so many of these illnesses that we're seeing.

Yeah.

And it's, it's the byproduct of what we're eating.

Well, it's eating, it's our air, our food, our water, right? I mean, we, we're just loaded with toxicity, and our bodies were not designed to be able to process this and hold it, right? And we're just accumulating. I mean, I call it total load. Well, we've got a total load in our bodies of accumulated toxins that didn't exist 100 years ago. I mean, I was talking to a man who said one of the biggest toxins in the body is tire dust. I mean, I never would have thought about that, but it's everywhere.

Well, hockey— excuse me, soccer goalies had a high incidence of cancer, and they discovered that it was the rubberized pellets that were used from recycled tires, that they would be the closest in proximity to the ground diving and falling into. And they had skyrocketing incidence from the rubberized pellets of cancer for high school kids, you know, getting cancer. So yes, you can have inhalations at work, chemical factories, chemical byproduct of the emissions, all of the above. And exposure is everywhere.

Well, and then you have things like Lyme and mold and bacterias and viruses, right? So again, it's that total load that's just overwhelming the body, that the body was not designed to have in it.

Right. God designed us to have a relatively low exposure to toxins and fight off what at the time was within, within the parameters of what the body could handle, because exposure to these new things wasn't there. So it would get the occasional toxin, but it can't handle the overload, right? So this is basically washing out the massive Lifetime accumulation to allow for, as God intended, a clean bloodstream for us to thrive and survive and preserve life. We, you know, we talk about the body's ability. We know the miracle that we can create life with our bodies. How incredible. But we don't realize—

How do we stay in that miracle, right?

We have the same miracle. We just have been so compromised, we don't realize it still exists in the same Beautiful magnitude. It's just so compromised. This basically washes away the things that are compromising that naturally restorative and, and, you know, strengthening that the body needs by getting rid of these, these contaminants.

So give, give us a kind of a time sense. Somebody who's really ill, how long would they take this? You've kind of said 4 to 6 months.

Yeah.

And then, you know, let's talk about prevention and let's talk about the healthy person, which there are fewer of.

I use that as a generalized statement of where the biggest cluster goes to, because individual results can be dramatic. But like any chart you would look, there tends to be sporadic early, sporadic late in this cluster. So a lot of that is dependent on, you know, sometimes there's a personal reaction to this where I don't know who will react at a quicker pace or slower.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes, you know, it's a look at someone that's in stage 4 and know that their chances have been minimized because they may not have the luxury of 6 months to take this because they have, you know, 2 months to live according to the, you know, diagnosis. Now, that doesn't mean all hope is lost because if you are one of the, say, stage 4 and given 2 months, if you're one of the people that respond in ways that I never can predict. They essentially come to life. There are a minority of people that respond quickly in stage 4 that's advanced because this is a lot of work and you're deeply riddled. But I've had people that have had several weeks into this, you know, the earliest I've seen is 3 weeks. I've seen 2 months, but they are the outliers. The majority will be in the— and the greater the challenge, which is What stage do you have, the greater the challenge of it being early. They tend to trend towards the 6-month mark.

Okay.

There's more cleaning to do. They're more compromised. There's a bigger ditch to dig out of, for lack of better words. And so really looking at this in terms of your individual need, it's going to start addressing it. But, you know, it's, it's never technically too late to consider this, but some people have come to us too late. And not been successful, not necessarily because they, they wouldn't have gotten well had they come to us 6 months earlier, but they— it's the last resort. They exhaust things. They come to us in hospice care. And that's tough because they're really far gone with very little time to use this. I always use the analogy of a headache. If you had an aspirin and had no experience with aspirin and a headache, and you had to judge an aspirin 5 minutes later, your headache might even be worse because it inevitably has to go through the system, take that worsening state, and circulate through the system to improve it. Same thing here. If you find yourself not initially getting well, it's not that.

Right.

The process of getting well has momentum driving in this direction. You've got to curtail it, clean it, and reverse it back.

Well, and that's not really how the body works anyway, right? That accumulation, that total load didn't get there overnight. But we've been conditioned and programmed to believe in the pharmaceutical world, oh, I have a headache, let me take an aspirin and my headache's gone in 20 minutes. That's it, right? So it's the mindset. Yeah, that's the big issue. And so how do you address people? And I see this in my practice a lot of just give me the fix and I'm going to keep living the lifestyle that I have, which is still accumulating the toxic burden, right? They're still not eating healthy, uh, still not exercising, all, all the things that we would say would keep us healthy and clean, right?

Individual choices that are made are, as you know, as varied as can be. You, you'll have people that are, shall we say, good foot soldiers and those who go astray. And what you'll find is the more you go astray, the lesser likelihood But we've had people go completely astray, literally not improve their diet and still get well with Essiac. That being said, their percentages of success are decreased than if they were to overhaul their diet and do better. So this has the ability to overcome even the worst of choices. And I tell you this because my father, who developed lung cancer in 2003, massive alcoholic, hung out at the bar, ate pickled eggs and chips all day. Never touched vegetables, and it was July 21st of 2003. He was drunk. He fell down the stairs backwards, broke his neck, went into the hospital walking, and they're like, "How are you walking? You have a broken neck." He had no idea. So they took him into Boston. They found out he had lung cancer. He, believe it or not, was initially going to do chemotherapy because even though I have Eziocte, they had he had such a bitter divorce, and I worked alongside my mother for many years. He associated this as in some way, shape, or form—

Your mother.

Attached to my mother, and he resented it so much. So the miracle of all miracles happened. We were sitting there going, okay, Dad, first of all, you have no money, so I have no right to— you know, I joke with him in a very strange way. I'm like, I have no reason for you to be dead for your inheritance. I actually love and care for you. I want you to be here. Take aside the fact that she is associated with this. I'm telling you, your son, I love you. I need you to take this. And he, while he was deciding about it, developed blood clots in his legs, which meant they couldn't treat him. And it really extended several days his thought.

Divine intervention.

It really was. And he, by May of 2004, was cancer-free. And I I couldn't make this up. He was kicked out of the house by his girlfriend because he didn't change his diet, and she saw his disregard for his life as appalling and didn't want anything to do with him. So he moved in with me, and he took me at face value. I said, this, this has the ability to do it in and of itself, but you might want to hedge your bet and eat a vegetable. I'm not lying when I tell you this. He didn't. And he lived from 2004 till August of 2012 cancer-free. So he again is a lesser likelihood, but I've seen that with others.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, you, you've gotta look at health as the entirety of your choices. This has a massive ability to kind of wash away your bad choices. But, you know, why wouldn't you lessen the introduction of toxins? While you're washing away to take that cycle of inflow down. But yet an alcoholic's addictive personality to food.

What about for the patient who is choosing standard of care, choosing the chemo and radiation? How does also taking Essiac help with that or hurt that? Yeah.

And again, the reparation that this does to the body, and we've actually had 2 studies ourselves and another study, we've had extraordinarily better results for those who use it with chemotherapy and radiation. Because what you'll find is the reparations, the lessening of nausea. We've had people that don't lose their hair. My dad's hair—I sound crazy saying this—but we've had many men. My dad's hair, his bald spot grew back, and it grew back its original brown color. And if you look on our Facebook group, we've had—we had a thread that mentioned that, and a bunch of people coming in said I had the same same thing. The DNA repair has been like—I have a brother. I'm 60 years old, and I have a brother who's been completely gray, who doesn't drink Eziac since 40. And he's 10 months older than me. And, uh, and so I look at this in terms of— I can't say definitively because DNA, you know, you never know what he inherited. But, um, I honestly think, as one of the researchers that ran the DNA study said, he said that may be why you tend to maintain the fort better than others. And, uh, I honestly believe that's the case. It keeps you healthy. It restores the damage. And eliminates the toxins that allow you to thrive no matter what you're dealing with.

Right. And so I'm assuming you take this every day preventatively. And so what does it look like preventatively or taking it to stay healthy versus somebody who may be dealing with some type of chronic issue or?

Well, here's the thing. If you want to see improvement, you should do the aggressive dose and do it for 6 months because why wouldn't you utilize this to offset a lifetime of accumulated waste?

Mm-hmm.

After that, you know, if you had like a house cleaning crew come through your house and they cleaned every corner, would you call them the next day or then, you know, or 3 days later? You'd be like, no, I've cleaned up, I can take a break. So if you've done that and achieved a 6-month aggressive protocol, and we're not here to just, you know, fearmonger and say if you don't do it every day you're in trouble and you're gonna— it's— you've done a significant amount. It takes time to accumulate and be You know, destructive over time. Again, in particular, if you're eating a good diet. So you could take time off after 6 months and do it as you choose. It really is something that we leave up to you after you achieve that total cleansing effect. Now, some people think, okay, I feel better on this every day, I want to take it every day. That's included. You can do that as well. But you also have, as preferred, shall I say. You've taken the dramatic amount of cleansing and done it and achieved it. And, you know, you deserve to get credit for that. Your body does give it credit. It gives it a chance to rest and not be having the need to have a disciplined approach over the course of the day anymore. You get, you know, the freedom. So yeah, people make their own choices. And one of those is to not take it after you've completed it. if you're already healthy and achieved health.

And so what about you? How often do you take it?

I think the best way I could put this is my intent is 3 times a day. Okay. Since I don't have a critical need, I have my best efforts. So occasionally I miss. I'm taking a 5-day vacation. I bring a cooler with me. I pack it with ice. I take it at regular intervals. I may be on a mountain hiking. I may miss that dose.

Right.

So this is something that the more urgent the need, the more you need to really align yourself with discipline. Because, you know, when fighting traumatic things, you need to have a very consistent approach. And having arbitrary taking of this or skipping doses, you're fighting— this is like the aggressor trying to come in through the front door. You have to sustain the pressure. And if you start to ease up at all, that momentum shifts and they can barge in. That's essentially what it's like to ease up that pressure and give it a chance to get the foot in the door with one dose, maybe a shoulder in the door if you miss another dose. So you see the progression. The more you skip, the lesser likelihood. So when it deals with critical health issues, yeah, it is about being— You got to stay committed to taking it. You're fighting for your life in many instances and you have to treat it seriously. And so you just take a thermos with you, put some ice in it. If you leave the house, set your alarm clock for the appropriate time to take it. You take it, you swig it. It's very easy to accommodate. Then upon rising and sometime upon coming home, you can figure out those 2 times. But the, the going out dose, get a thermos with some ice, and that really creates a doable, you know, game plan.

Okay. Can you talk a little bit, Brian, about the herbs? And how do they work synergistically? I have this discussion a lot between a single herb versus a collection of herbs. So can you share a little bit more about that?

Yeah, well, synergistically, you're having to do, you know, I don't know the specifics of all the research. I get generalized, you know, responses from Dr. Brusch. But essentially, when they found the optimal results, they found every consideration from elimination to soothing to not allowing the absorption of You know, the introductions to the, to the gut and the intestines. So they basically found that the balance was in the results. They synergistically tweaked, and the synergy is only the byproduct of higher, lower this. What happened when we went higher here? That achieved this. Do we go higher? Oops, that got a negative result. We, we retrace it down over here. What do we do relative when we trace it down? And the shifts It's like an equalizer on a sound editor's board. Sometimes this— the vocals need to be stepped up at certain points. And so they were really trying to do this balancing act, and you have to exhaust minor tweaks, major tweaks, inclusion, exclusion. Say, for example, if you add an herb and it individually does well, but then when included into the formula, it doesn't have the same merit when mixed with the other herbs.

Right.

So as a generalized thing, I got that's what they were trying to achieve. So you have many aspects of this, and they are, you know, like I say, DNA repair, expelling, you know, some of these have, like I said, soothing, reparative. So it's all of the above. Your body needs to not just get rid of toxins, It needs to restore gut health. And, you know, so do we have prebiotic aspects of some of these herbs? Yes. And so all of those things collectively in the right balance will address all of those needs.

So do you recommend, so I'm seeing a lot more sensitive people and I think it's that total load, right? So they have that Herx reaction very quickly. Yeah. Years ago, I didn't see that. I see it now with probably 70% of the people I'm working with. And that's indicative of the total load in the body. Right. Do you ever recommend people start low and slow, or do you just have people jump in and go for it?

That was flushed out during the research, and it still maintained itself to be the case. The worst-case scenario, it's a detox. So what you expect is it's going to do its job. It does it either moderately for 75% of the people where that elimination takes place in a more, you know, graduated form over time. And other people have that initial 2, 3, sometimes 4 days where it's, you know, the dam breaks, so to speak. You know?

Yes.

It doesn't do it in the extreme measure that these other ones that cause Herx reactions. It's not this acute response. It is moderate. It is simply that you'll have to Excuse yourself a few extra times that day. You're not going to have that fatigue, that, you know, all the things that the reactions, the aching, that none of that happens. It's just simply, excuse me, I'll be back in 5 minutes. And that's it. And that's the beauty of this. It is the long game because the really harsh attempt is one that Creates a false sense of achievement because until you have a pristine digestive tract in its entirety, it doesn't matter if your filter, so to speak, if you're— whether it be your air filter, whatever, has this much or that much of a contaminant. It's got to have none to efficiently work, which is why they take your air filter in your car at the oil change and they show, well, You should probably change this. The same with this. Compromise is in the filter being compromised. And so you want to get a pristine end result. That is a long time of consistency, but you can't do it with the harsh ones because you can't sustain it long enough to get that done without the Herx reaction.

Right.

So moderated means completed. It is not a rush job, but it's done very, you know, methodically day by day.

And so this comes in like a dry herb formula and then people add it to water. Yes. And they cook it. So again, like we're dealing with, you know, toxic water in the tap water. So is, do you guys, do you have a recommendation to use or does it not matter?

I'll put this in, in, in We, we say the best water you could possibly use is there, but you'll be surprised how many people have particular sources of water or are stubborn or don't buy into that, which I find tragic. If someone is utilizing water consistently and they make Essiac with the water that they utilize all the time, it's consistent with what they're ingesting, cooking with all day. So switching out the Essiac will do nothing compared to if they're ingesting it all day.

Right.

Our overall thing is, you know, a suggestion. We leave it up to you, but it's a good idea to really improve your water supply. I have our own, you know, filtering system. It's top-notch. Water is a source that you cannot overstate the significance of the impact. You know, you look at Flint, Michigan, you look at, you know, Mm-hmm. These issues, water's not a given. And they are, sometimes they will do a random testing for one year is safe and the next year it isn't. So we advise you to go with the best water you can use. We don't mandate it because some people just have a limited income or don't, can't afford a system or even bottled water. And, but we do recommend it. But if you make the choice to do this, we've seen Countless people utilize water that isn't the best and still do well. And the rates are surprisingly close to some of these other waters which have filters and stuff, but they're not quite there. So why wouldn't you head yourself and get all the way there?

Right.

With tap water from all different sources, it's pretty darn close in its consistency, but I believe you gotta take every advantage to save your life.

Right. Well, to thrive, right? We're, we're supposed to thrive as humans.

Are. Yeah. And, and it's funny because we're given this, this wonderful thing and we're disregarding the respect. Uh, somewhere along the way, the choices of temptation— it goes back to, you know, Adam and Eve, the temptation, you know, the— and, and temptation has been worsened as we create a society that supposedly evolves and taste considerations and convenience and, you know, aspirating things from chemicals, as you said. And that's the problem. We are, we are just simply not in the same overall environment of temptation and passively ingesting, you know, aspirating, for example, something. So the two together, it's the deck has been stacked against us.

Yeah, it sure has. And so we're living in a time on the planet where Um, natural remedies are being shut down, etc. Um, how are— I'm sure SCX been in that same boat, right? How have you handled that, you know, and, and are you still selling in Canada and how are you handling that? Because that is, there's a lot of money behind if it's not patentable.

We sell every country. We sell all the time to Canada. Okay. Yep. We sell everywhere you can imagine. The restrictions have been— well, here's the thing. We were fortunate enough to get really to the extent we did by telling our truth and having testimonials and the research and the association, the whole collective thing. We have a proof of authenticity page which goes back to Dr. Brusch, Rienke's. So you see that we are in fact who we say we are. It's the Wild West now when it comes to Essiac because it has been deregulated. as far as who can make what claims. So if you are looking at this, you've gotta go to an authentic provider, ourselves. There's a company called Fluorescence. They are, they, you know, they have what we have, but extremely more expensive, which is why we got this in the first place. Dr. Bruch was initially affiliated with that group and he saw the pricing, which made him very upset because accessibility is his main priority. He says, if they can't afford it, they get it for free. free. So about 10 to 15% of what we send out every day is free. That's per the mandate of Dr. Bruch. And every attempt to keep this price low, you can still purchase it for about a dollar a day. And that's because as we grow by respecting the customer, by getting these referrals, we are growing because of success. And, you know, we have a satisfaction guarantee. Um, that if you don't see improvement, you know, if you're not satisfied, we give you your money back. Nobody does that when they're dealing with these critical issues. We've been able to walk the walk, not because we are any sort of saints or doing anything. The saints are the people that did the research. I happen to get something that has extraordinary consistency. It's not absolute. There are failures. There are people that I, I see that I think are going to make it that don't. And people that I don't think are going to make it that do. But the overall consistency, first of all, relative to conventional treatment, has been extraordinary. And so extraordinary, people say, well, how are we going to believe without any consequence for what you're saying? So I had an identical twin brother in 2004 go through a divorce because he, he had ALS. And for lack of better words, his wife was of low character. And left him. And a contributing factor, I don't think he identified, it was more of a character issue than financial, but, uh, she addressed the alternative treatments that were being utilized and the cost was like $30,000. It did put a stress on his marriage, but I don't believe that was what broke it. But he was devastated. It was his last chance at love. He came to us saying, after seeing what my father had experienced and many others, he was a stockbroker. He didn't work.

Mm-hmm.

with us, but he said, you should let people know they can't be taken advantage of here, that this stuff is what it is. So we decided to be the first people ever to deal with these particular health issues. So, you know what, good idea. So in 2004, we put this out as a means of showing not only that we're going to respect you and never make it possible to take advantage of you, but as a way of— to correlate the actual success rate. I always say, if this were 60 or 70% effective, that would be relatively extraordinary, uh, you know, for people after 6 months. It would beat so many other, you know, options. But if that were the case with us and we're giving 40, 30% of our proceeds while donating for free and keeping it at a dollar a day, we'd be out of business within a year or two. So how are we here, you know, 22 years later with that in place? It's accountability. People say, well, there's got to be a loophole. I'm like, no, it's actually in writing. We do every person that requests one. You don't have to jump through hoops, fill out forms. They get it because we want to honor what they've gone through, have those resources, address it elsewhere if you want, you know. And I always ask them the same thing. If there were a loophole that you could go through in this, you know, shell game, so to speak, then do you think anyone else would be doing it? Any other company if it were that easy to pull off? The answer is no one's doing it because they don't have what we have in the success rate. And the only company that does have it is charging extraordinary amounts. We're, we're talking multiples of 12 to 20 times what we are. We're talking extraordinarily more expensive. Their refunding would be a big concession to them if they were to do it. So they, They would rather utilize, you know, keeping all of their sales. But I don't want to take advantage of people because I watched the suffering of my brother. And that, that really shaped our way of doing our interactions with people. We have to give them respect. They're going through hell. And if we take advantage of people during their lowest hour, I've been there. It's the worst feeling. You combine sickness and financial stress and It's cruel what people will do to take advantage of people in their worst hour.

Yeah. Creates more suffering, sadly. So where can people find you? Where, where can they buy your tea? Where, where can they learn more?

If you wanted to get in touch with us, the first word is genuine. G-E-N-U-I-N-E, like, like a genuine product. And then the next word is Essiac. Essiac is the nurse who first found out about this from her patient. Her last name was a French name, C-A-I-S-S-E. She flipped that backwards in order to make the word Essiac, E-S-S-I-A-C. So it's genuinessiac.com is our website. We also have a Facebook group called Genuine Essiac Users, so that's a nice place to get content. We're on TikTok. So, um, if you do go on Facebook though, I mentioned it's the Wild West. There are some groups that are out there with no lineage at all that are doing a better job. It's tough to convince people that have been lied to because fear overwhelms them. So there are some groups that are utilizing fear. We have become the biggest distributors, so we're going to be targeted. So there are some groups that are designed just to target us and make absurd things such as Dr. Brusch put harmful herbs in there that are— I mean, the absurdity that an 8-year approach that's been documented— there's a book called The Esiac Report, and you can get that online. It's got all the pictures, all the documents. It has Rienkees working, tells a story about the herbs, the progression through time. It's the best documentation, but people aren't always invested in that Once they hear that we're the boogeyman. So what happens is they come to us, I heard this and that. So we lead them to facts. We have a download of that book. If you search The ESIAC Report in the microfi— uh, uh, the magnifying glass, just put that in the search engine. It's not the first thing that comes up, surprisingly. It's like third or fourth one down in the results that you'll find The ESIAC Report. You download the book for free. It's got the entire history. That way you'll see without a doubt the truth of the matter. But people in these groups don't have that, that connection. But occasionally when they do spill over and they come at me and I'm backpedaling, I have to absorb, calm, realize they're not bad people. They've been influenced in a bad direction. Say, hang with me, I'm going to show you. And I show them and they thank me profusely. And when they get well, that's another thing. They start telling other people in the group. But what happens is when they go in the group and say, this is what I found, the group excludes them, deletes them from the group and all of their content. So the narrative stays negative until they come to us. So it's this battle of, you know, legitimacy versus a con game. That's the internet. We, I, I, I've, it's, it's been a tense thing at times, but we have to fight for what's good.

Absolutely. So genuineSCIAC.com.

That's correct.

Okay. Yeah. All right. Any final words that you'd like to share with the audience about this?

If you have any concern with your health and it's, you have to correlate this to, as I said before, the significant need. You can dabble with this. You can see if you feel good in 2 months. You can feel, uh, good in, if you, if you only take it twice a day, Kind of give it a run, see what you what you do. If it doesn't achieve on twice a day, which some people get that benefit and they sustain that because it's convenient. Some people find that falls short. They'll kind of up it to three times a day, give it more prolonged approach. This is something that inevitably you'll find if you have no significant health issue, you can kind of dabble with. But the more legitimate, whether it be arthritis, it helps with diabetes because. You know, if you have diabetes, you have a compromised function of your pancreas and your liver, which do a careful balance to regulate blood sugar. Send clean blood through there, they function and do well. So you're going to find that if you have any of these things that have to do with an inflammatory state, with toxins being deposited somewhere, whether it be arthritis, diabetes, you know, you're gonna be— very serious about it. But if you all are already relatively healthy, you can kind of dip your toe in the water and dabble. But I always say the best approach, if you want to test it to its full limit, is to give it some timeframe on the most aggressive approach to give it a chance to wow you. You don't have to if you're not, you know, compromised to a great degree, but why the heck not? Have some fun with it. That's it.

Well, and given that 93% of North America has a metabolic issue, which means You know, they're on the way to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, something, chronic illness. Yeah. Right. Because of the toxic soup that we're living in. Yeah. I would say just about everybody could benefit from utilizing it.

Just look at this as a scrub brush to, to erase your history that you, that you, you know, have with toxins. Yeah. Primarily there are other aspects, but that's it. And put your body in its natural God designed your body to have to be clean. That's it. I don't want to be too redundant, but that's it.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the wealth of information, and I'm excited to have a great source. I work with a lot of, a lot of clients who are dealing with chronic illness, so definitely be trying this myself and utilizing it.

Yep. So thank you so much. One last thing, and I almost forgot this: the taste is just the taste. We don't sweeten it, we don't do anything. If you want to, most people drink it straight. Some people, it'll have sediment. Make sure you stir it vigorously to distribute each dose. Stirring equals distribution equals it's in each cup. And then if you want to improve taste or texture, you can dilute it with natural fruit or vegetable juice or water. Those are always in play. So taste is the only thing that, that might A small percentage of people don't like the taste, but might have to be considered with just— most people like, uh, lemon, lemon juice, not lemonade. But yeah.

This is why we have 2 fingers that we can plug our nose to drink it.

Well, it, it really is a matter of just get concentrated lemonade. Um, I'm saying 85% of people don't like it, but people's palates are spoiled and they— not everyone appreciates a healthy taste. So Yeah, get some, you know, some lemon juice, put it in there. And that's the only objection that I'd say. If you have a spoiled palate or you can't, you just don't like it, you can overcome that very easily. So there's no excuse to not take it.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hey, this has been great. I appreciate this big time. So thank you for helping us spread the word.