VITASPECIAL.COM

How It All Began

Vitaspecial.com is one of the oldest websites devoted to natural modalities that have the potential to make us feel healhier.

It is spearheaded by founder and editor in chief Jacques Schen. It was founded in 2005, 8 years after Jacques’s wife (Beatrice) had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. At the time of the initial diagnosis in 1997, doctors had told Jacques and his wife that her cancer was so advanced, her life expectancy was in weeks, rather then months.

I remember driving back home from the hospital. Beatrice and I were stunned.  We had just received devastating news and we made the trip  in tears. And in silence.  I remember the silence! Beatrice had just been told she wasn’t going to be around by Christmas and I was contenplating a life without her.  That kind of pain and those emotions can never be fully expressed by words and unfortunately, I know painfully well there are all too many people out there who have experienced (are experiencing) the same thing! (Jacques Schen)

After the intial shock, Jacques and Beatrice made a pact: to live each and everyday as if it was their last…. And to fight.

For Beatrice, it was the beginning of a 4 months period intersected by surgery, chemotherapies and radiation. These were torturous months for her as she began to suffer from the side effects of these treatments.

For Jacques, it was the start of a journey during which he began to explore what was out there, in terms on non traditional treatments. He hit the books… joined news group, went to support meetings for cancer patients and their care givers, and searched the internet.  As you may or may not know, the internet in 1997 wasn’t what it is today. Information on non traditional treatments was not readily available and when it was found, came in hard to read reports that were frowned upon by the medical community.

I would bring back Beatrice home from her chemo treatments and whilst she was reeling from the after effects of chemotherapy, sometimes for 3 or 4 days I would search…  Our doctor had told us there was no cure. He was certain she wasn’t going to make it.  The only uncertainty was that he didn’t know how many weeks she would live.  What was also absolutely certain was the amount of suffering Beatrice was going through after each and everyone of her chemotherapy sessions. There may have been no cure, but surely there was something out that could help her better deal with the side effects. If we couldn’t prolong her life, let alone save it, I should at least try to find something, anything that would help her.

And thus began a long journey of discovery, trips to various alternative medicine centers and the search for at least one doctor who believed that alternative supplements had value in the treatment of cancer. This process was a lenghtly and harduous one but eventually, Jacques begun to see signs that there were solutions out there.  Not cures (he was wise enough to not believe in those miracle cure claimes) but modalities that could help. He compiled a list of supplements that might help and finally showed it to Beatrice Oncologist.

I remember handing him a piece of paper with names of supplements I had read about, and been told about by at least one oncologist in Chicago who was treating cancer patients with both traditional and non traditional modalities. I remember seeing him glancing at the list, grunt a little and hand it back to me: “there is nothing here that is going to harm her, but at the same time, there is nothing there that will help her in any way.  You would be wasting your money but if you want, I am not telling you not to.“

That’s all I wanted to hear. That the list of vitamins and supplements I had discovered would at the very least NOT make Beatrice any worse.

The shining light of hope

Beatrice started to take the natural supplements from the list Jacques had compiled. Two months had passed from the day she had been diagnosed and she had another full two months of additional chemotherapy sessions to go through.  Her life expectance was also two months shorter that it was at the time of her diagnosis. She began to feel the effects of these supplements 4 weeks after she started taking them.  Her recovery periods were shorter, her response to the treatments felt easier to deal with. As the days passed, she began to feel better. There was a spring in her steps, it was very much like her cancer was “falling asleep at the wheel.”

2005 or Eight Years Later

Eight full years after being told she had weeks to live Beatrice was still alive and mostly well.  Cancer is an unforgiving passenger and seems to find pleasure in rising its head to cause chaos from time to time.

Over the course of these 8 years, she went in and out of remission 3 times, with the resulting chemotherapies and radiation treatments that go along with this nasty disease. The one constant in that life was the supplements she never stopped taking. She had outlived her doctor’s life expectancy prediction by 8 full years.  These were important years, mostly filled with happiness and good health.  When she was in remission, Beatrice was resplendissant.  When she wasn’t, she was able to copy much better and recover much faster.  Something was working for her. She wasn’t going to stop either the conventional methods of treating cancer nor the non conventional alermative regimen she was following.

The Launch of This Website

It was in 2005 that Jacques decided to launch this site.  His sole intention was to document Beatrice and his journey through all these years and talk about the toll that a terminal malady can have on people. Jacques was determined to provide visitors with informative, transparent, and latest reviews on different supplements and brands he had researched. Visitors came in droves to the site, looking for inspiration.  The amount of visitors put forward to huge cost of running a site like this one. There were bills to pay!

How Do We Pay Our Bills?

Our goal is to ensure we offer our visitors genuine, accurate and up-to-date information regarding CBD. The quality content and unbiased reviews of products we include here are made possible by advertisements and affiliate links on our site. A considerable amount of work goes into research before we put any links on our site that would encourage our visitors to try CBD and other products for themselves. It’s not just about the money. The only products we recommend and feature on our site are those that we trust and test ourselves.

Running a website such as ours is a labor of love. We do it because we have been (and are) in the same situation as most of our visitors who are looking for ways to become healthier. It is also expensive. Cost of writers, hosting, security certificate, content managers and support staff are substantial. The commission we make for each purchase generated through our affiliate links (at no additional cost to you) help us pay for these costs.

Marijuana

Marijuana was very much one of the natural modalities that Beatrice had incorporated in her daily regimen.  Or at least tried! While she definitely felt the benefits of marijuana, she never could get use to the “highs”.  This is a woman that had never take any psychotic substance in her life, had never even smoked.

CBD

From humble beginning, this site has morphed into a platform featuring cannabis advocates, cannabis specialists, and experienced cannabis writers. 

All of us at VITASPECIAL.COM are passionate about CBD because we believe in its potency and we know it can drastically improve the quality of our lives for the better.

Composed of CBD and Hemp specialists, our content is unbiased and every effort is made to ensure that it is accurate.