A growth on the birch – medicinal mushroom chaga.

by Paul Fassa
Health Impact News

The information in this article is not intended to give medical advice. This information is for educational purposes, showing the options beyond chemo and radiation for cancer.

Mushrooms are among the least publicized potential cancer treatment adjuncts to alternative cancer treatments. Even most holistic medical practitioners and journalists ignore the immune boosting and moderating properties of medicinal mushrooms.

Do chaga mushrooms have anti-cancer properties that mainstream oncology is obliged to suppress in order to maintain its high revenue monopoly over cancer victims and their families? Some say chaga does well as both a healing agent for cancer or as an adjunct to help chemo patients survive their ordeal.

The Chaga Mushroom (Inonotus obliquus)

This mushroom provides a folk medicine that has been used for hundreds of years in northern climates, especially Russia. Science writer Ralph Moss, Ph.D., stated there are at least 135 PubMed chaga studies with 44 demonstrating efficacy on cancer, but unfortunately none were human trials.

Ralph Moss was fired from his media relations position with the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Institute after publicly leaking the lies that covered up their own scientist’s positive evidence of efficacy and safety with laetrile.

Ironically, Sloane-Kettering has acknowledged the validity of many lab culture (in vitro) and animal (in vivo) studies on chaga mushrooms and is suggesting human studies, unlikely events since there’s no chance of cashing in on patents to motivate funding human trials.

Though not published in a medical journal or perhaps published and lost, Moss divulged what he had discovered from other reliable sources.

“In a 48-patient human clinical trial in Poland in 1957, ten patients treated with chaga showed a reduction of tumor size, a decrease in pain, a decrease in the intensity and the frequency of hemorrhaging, and a recovery accompanied with better sleep, appetite and feelings of improvement.

Most of these patients were females treated with chaga for cancer of the genital organs or breast cancer.” (Source)

Chaga popped into view in the West as a potential cancer remedy in 1968 through a semi-autobiographical novel The Cancer Ward by literature Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an outspoken Soviet dissident during the oppressive Soviet Union’s time.

In that novel, the protagonist, Kostoglokof, cures himself of cancer with chaga teas and tells others with him in the Siberian cancer ward about it.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel:

“He could not imagine any greater joy than to go away into the woods for months on end, to break off this chaga, crumble it, boil it up on a campfire, drink it and get well like an animal.

To walk through the forest for months, to know no other care than to get better! Just as a dog goes to search for some mysterious grass that will save him . . .” (Source)

Ralph Moss mentioned that a Russian/English translator he had known interviewed author Solzhenitsyn who was residing in Vermont after being exiled from Russia as a dissident shortly after he was released from his own gulag imprisonment in 1953.

There he revealed the protagonist’s cure in his novel was based on his personal experience of curing his cancer with chaga tea while in a Soviet prison cancer ward during the brutally oppressive Josef Stalin regime. (Source) 

Explaining the Chaga Mushroom’s Appearance and Preparation

Chaga is a parasitic fungus that resembles cancer and grows on the barks of white birch trees in colder northern climates. Externally it appears to be a chunk of coal stuck onto the tree.

Upon removing the apparent coal substance, sometimes called a conk, and cutting it open, the inner brown cork-like substance that provides much of chaga’s active ingredients is exposed.

Those ingredients can be extracted by brewing the cork-like chunks as a tea and steeping for an hour with hot but not boiling water; the usual alcohol tincture method can be used with a high-quality vodka.

However, tinctures do require at least a month of “nursing” at room temperature in a dark area with a moderate shaking each day to move the material around. Equal amounts of vodka and chaga chunks in a jar should work.

Several online video demonstrations for making chaga teas are available via YouTube channels as well as instructions for using vodka or grain alcohol with distilled water 50/50 solutions for chaga tinctures – available here.

Naturally, not everyone is situated near northern white birch trees. There are several online sources located in New England and Canada that can provide chunks, powders, or tinctures. You can start your search here. 

The only concerns raised by chaga’s increased popularity is the possibility of high demand destroying supply. Not all birch trees are “infected” with the parasite chaga that can ultimately kill the tree.

Other Health Benefits from Chaga

Anything implying a cancer remedy outside of lucrative orthodox oncology business is controversial. However, in a video interview, integrative M.D. Dr. Issac Eliaz explains how medicinal mushrooms not only regulate the immune system – they “have the intelligence to train the immune system.”

Probably to avoid controversy and protect his MD license, during the interview Dr. Eliaz promoted using mushrooms to protect against cancer and enable the immune system to survive the ravages of conventional cancer therapies. (Source)

It’s important to understand that chaga doesn’t merely stimulate the immune system, it’s adaptogenic and regulates the immune system according to what’s needed, keeping it from overstimulating and creating a cytokine storm that attacks its host.

Overstimulating the immune system creates a cascading storm of unregulated cytokines (proteins such as interleukin or interferon) that cause the inflammatory effects that often lead to autoimmune diseases, paralysis, or death. This phenomenon is what causes most adverse vaccine reactions.

Thus chaga can play at least a palliative if not a curative role for many afflicted with various autoimmune diseases. And there are quite a few autoimmune diseases that have increasingly permeated most industrialized nations due to increased pollutants, processed foods, synthetic pharmaceutical medications, and of course vaccinations. Here’s a comprehensive list of autoimmune diseases.

Chaga’s adaptogenic immunological responses are able to help reduce inflammation, the physiological foundation of most autoimmune diseases.

Chaga is effective at restoring apoptosis in cancer cells. Apoptosis is programmed cell death that removes older normal cells to be replaced by new ones. Cancer cells don’t ordinarily recognize this normal procedure to make room for new cells to replace older ones. That’s how they survive “eternally.”

With chaga, as with other natural treatments, apoptosis is induced only in cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone.

Using chaga as a daily tea has shown the ability to improve endurance, probably as a result of its flexible adaptogenic immunological properties, which increases muscle glycogen, a glucose formation, and reduces lactic acid, which will inhibit oxygenation for producing energy.

It is also antiviral. One study showed that it greatly reduced the viral load of hepatitis C in vitro (lab cultures) in a very short time. (Study abstract)

Chaga is a super antioxidant. It has the highest ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbent Capacity) among high antioxidant superfoods. (Source)

It’s many attributes make it a highly medicinal mushroom whether used as an adjunct with other natural cancer remedies, a survival support with conventional cancer therapies, a support for autoimmune diseases, or as an immune support to protect against all diseases including cancer.

Chaga Caveats

Chaga can act as a blood thinner. If one is using blood thinners or scheduled for surgery soon, chaga should be avoided. Applying the “more is better” solution is warned against. There are not enough reports of overindulging chaga teas or tinctures.

If you are considering an all natural DIY cancer treatment using a recommended two or three protocols, take the following message from the Cancer Tutor seriously. The diet is as important as the therapies attempted.

Many alternative therapies are denied full fruition because the standard American diet (SAD) was not abandoned. Here’s an excerpt from an educational paper on the Cancer Tutor site:

Understand this carefully, taking any alternative cancer treatment is like putting gasoline in your car – you are on your way to killing cancer cells, etc. But having a bad diet, while you are on a cancer treatment, is like putting water in that same gasoline tank!!  More details on “Cancer Diet.”

Ignore the guide’s comment at the 35-second mark of the video below stating chaga is from dead birchwood. That’s not correct according to those who know.