The Chaga Story
By Victor Yurasik
The Truth About Chaga — From Someone Who Has Lived It
Search online for chaga and you’ll find bold promises everywhere. Gurus claim their product is the strongest. Bloggers insist only one country grows the “real” mushroom. Others preach that unless it’s dual-extracted, it’s useless.
After more than 20 years of living with chaga — and as someone who grew up in Siberia, where it belongs — I can tell you: most of this noise has little to do with reality.
Too often, the loudest voices have never actually taken chaga for years, never harvested it, never relied on it. They recycle marketing slogans and pass themselves off as experts.
That’s why I’m writing this. Not to argue, but to clear the fog. If you’re curious about chaga — if you want to know what it really is and what it can do — you deserve to hear it from someone who has lived it, day after day, for decades.
This series is my attempt to set the record straight. It’s part fact, part history, part personal journey. Some of it may challenge what you’ve read elsewhere. But every word comes from direct experience, from research I dug up myself, and from a lifetime of watching what chaga actually does — not just what it’s supposed to do.
Part I — My First Encounter with Chaga
My story with chaga didn’t begin with business or books. It began in the forests outside Irkutsk in the 1980s, when I was a boy. My family lived in a small house on the city’s edge, where Siberia’s birch forests stretched almost to our doorstep.
Each spring, as the snow thinned and the birches woke, my father and I went into the woods. We weren’t hunting mushrooms. We were collecting birch sap — berezoviy sok — the tree’s sweet, clear lifeblood. To us, it was a tradition: drill the bark, set the glass jar, watch the drops fall. We carried home 100 liters or more each season, preserved with old Russian methods so it would last through summer. After a long, harsh winter, that sap was like bottled sunlight — cleansing, strengthening, and alive.
On those trips, I noticed strange black growths clinging to the birches. One day I asked my father what they were. He paused, glanced at the tree, and answered quietly:
“That’s a powerful mushroom. Not for everyday use. People brew it as medicine — but only in serious cases. It’s strong. You must take very little.”
That was all he said. Chaga wasn’t fashionable, it wasn’t sold in shops. It was simply there, part of the forest’s hidden pharmacy, treated with respect and caution.
A Family Memory Etched in Time
Years later, when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer, he refused hospital treatment at first. Instead, he began drinking chaga tea every day. For nearly ten years, the disease barely advanced. Only when he finally agreed to chemotherapy did his health decline rapidly — and not long after, he was gone.
That memory stayed with me. It didn’t make me reject medicine, but it left me with a deep respect for the quiet power of natural remedies — and a sense that chaga was something more than folklore.
Losing the Wisdom, Then Rediscovering It
By the time I reached adulthood, the world had shifted. Folk medicine was dismissed as “old-fashioned.” Doctors became the only trusted voices. I didn’t question it. I was young, healthy, and convinced that science had all the answers.
Then came my father’s cancer diagnosis. His doctor urged immediate chemotherapy. My father looked to me for advice, but I was too unsure, too conditioned by authority to suggest otherwise. We trusted the doctor. The treatment began.
Six months later, my father was weaker than ever. That’s when he remembered chaga. I spent a whole day in the forest gathering large, dark chunks. He drank the tea faithfully, three to four cups daily. But it was too late. The doctor insisted on continuing chemotherapy. Within a year, my father was gone.
It’s a painful truth: if he had relied more on chaga and less on “modern certainty,” I believe he could have lived longer — and with far less suffering.