As a nurse and health care professional, Barry Stecyk has seen first-hand the ravages of mental illness and the impact on families.
“I believe no one is safe from this unless they take some measure of precaution to protect their brain,” said the Vernon resident and father of two.
Over the years, Stecyk has been on a global search for some kind of answer to a problem that affects one in two Canadians by the time they reach the age of 40.
That search took him to scientists working with the plant life found on the coastal plains of Shanghai, where local herbs have been used for centuries as a therapy for many chronic conditions.
This month, together with his friend and business partner, Steve McWhirter, the duo has launched Esteem Nutraceuticals, which is based in Vernon.
As its first priority, the company will introduce Neurobalance to the national market.
The product has been approved by Health Canada after a multi-million-dollar, double blind, cross over, placebo clinical study completed October 2014.
Esteem’s key collaborator is the Shanghai Innovative Research Center (SIRC), which works with scientists all over the world to extract the healing properties from medicinal herbs like ginseng and gingko and develop traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) therapies.
“TCM has more than a 2,000-year history of human clinical use,” said Yang Zirong, who is the director of SIRC.
“We integrate modern life science, chemistry, and information technology with TCM that lead you to know what, why and how herbal combinations work for holistic body regulation with minimal or no side-effects.”
At the heart of SIRC is the Saphron TCM Database which has information on 1,400 diseases, 180,000 TCM prescriptions, 9,000 herbs, 50,000 active compound structures and more than 120,000 items of related biological activities.
Esteem has a distribution centre in Vernon.