Not long ago, I communicated with Andrew Weill, M.D., the author of "Spontaneous Healing" and other books devoted to integrative and complementary medicine (in which it's OK to blend alternative medicine and nutritional strategies with Western approaches). After speaking with Dr. Weill for my story, our conversation downshifted in my reasons for writing it, which include a chronic auto-immune disease in the wake of cancer, among other things. My prescription became: go see an "integrative oncologist" in San Francisco--one brilliant and uncommonly kind Donald Abrams at USCF's Osher Center--which I did.
Abrams was the right choice--I'm cancer-free now, but don't want a relapse, or a secondary cancer--and he had trained with Weill, and had lots of nutritional and herbal advice for me--among prescribing some Western strategies and a Chinese medical consult. The one thing both world-famous doctors advocate, however, is: CUT OUT DAIRY. The oncologist told me something I had heard for years: that no human, short of some people in Scandanavia, have the genetic makeup to digest it naturally--which is why it causes so many digestive problems. The other reason? It induces inflammation, if only because it's animal protein, and can cause cancer, specifically lymphoma and leukemia, my friends from the past.
Now, comes Shallot friend and colleague Hannah Wallace to the cause with a giant, amazing, and deep Salon article about the disease-curing benefits and bacterial dangers of raw milk, as well as the subcultures of raw-milk drinkers who will do anything to step around the government to get it. What's going on here? Hannah writes:
"Many people come to raw milk as a last resort; one man I spoke to for this article had terrible asthma, one woman had debilitating arthritis, and another had osteoporosis (which pasteurized milk hadn't improved) -- and all saw complete reversals of their diseases after a few months of drinking it. Their stories were persuasive, but in an age where E. coli is turning up at Taco Bell and even in organic spinach, I wondered: Is it really safe to drink unpasteurized milk?"
Not only that, but what about my doctors' cautionary words? Why are we still obsessed with udder liquid when so many alternatives abound? I posit biological psychology. The milk habit is hard for a civilization to break when it's the first food--the first suggested "healing food"--offered to us. Of course it's healing diseases in a small subsection of the population. So's love and, for that matter, God.
UPDATE: Hannah writes to correct me about milk causing cancer. She says:
"That's true of pasteurized milk, honey, not raw milk. SO many people digest raw milk with no problem whatsoever. If you need any proof that our ancestors drank rawmilk, I'll send you "The Untold Story of Milk," by Ron Schmidt. Raw milk contains lactobaccillus, which means that even those who are lactose intolerant (i.e. can't digest pasteurized milk) can drink it with no gas or bloating. And it has CLA (grass fed milk does) that FIGHTS cancer and arthritis (which is inflammation) as well as asthma and eczema."
LAST UPDATE: My integrative oncologist advises me to Google "milk and cancer" and then visit milksucks.com. He advises erring on the side of caution: He just presented at the milk and prostate cancer link--references to milk and lymphoma exist in the Integrative Cancer Therapies tumor-board article on refractory lymphoma. So those of you with PubMed, or some medical studies database, as well as the ability to stomach all this jargon, get on there and have a read. Then send me hate mail for ruining your morning.
What I've learned: Milk is way hotter a topic than I ever thought. Next week: A celebrity deathmatch on, yes, you guessed it, TEA.
