Her advice, stripped of its mystical language, is startlingly modern: Eat less meat. Drink more water. Move your body. Use herbs before chemicals. Does drinking bitter herbs cure cancer? Science says no. But ask the thousands who wrote to Maria Treben—who claimed their warts fell off, their ulcers healed, their eyesight returned—and they will tell you a different story.
We live in the age of "bio-hacking" and functional medicine. In many ways, Maria Treben was the original bio-hacker. She looked at the standard Western diet of processed food and saw toxicity. She looked at modern stress and saw the root of all illness. Uspesi U Lecenju Marija Treben.pdf
Detractors point out that Swedish Bitters contain Senna (a powerful laxative) and Camphor (toxic in high doses). They argue that the "successes" in the book are likely coincidences or the result of the placebo effect. Her advice, stripped of its mystical language, is
According to Treben, the recipe came from a 16th-century Swedish physician, Dr. Samst, and was rediscovered in an archive. When she began distributing the recipe in the 1970s, she wasn't selling a product; she was selling a philosophy: Heal thyself. Use herbs before chemicals