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11/18/2007: "Breast Milk Treating Cancer? - Am I surprised?"

In the news this week is a California man who is treating his own cancer with a daily dose of breast milk. He was diagnosed in 1999, but continues to keep it well under control by ingesting a few ounces a day from a human milk bank. Actually, I'm surprised he did not try cow colostrum (a cow's first post partum milk). I believe using cow colostrum is more common among alternative medicine believers, and I do have a personal friend who once cured his own serious ailment with it after his doctors had given up and pronounced him incurable.

So this news media attention to a case of human breast milk successfully treating the big one, cancer, is wonderful news! There have been a lot of studies on how much healthier breastfed babies are over formula fed babies, and there have been studies of adults who were breastfed as babies being healthier than adults who were formula fed as babies, but this is the first I've heard anything in the mainstream media about an adult taking breast milk specifically for a current ailment.

Now what is the likelihood we can encourage lactating women to donate any extra milk they've pumped to milk banks? There is certainly a need by hospitalized newborns and premies for it, to give them a fighting chance at surviving infancy, and that seems to be an easy decision for mothers. They know deep down that through them, nature makes the perfect food for babies. But if women knew their donations were intended for adults? I would certainly do it for a close relatives, but for a stranger, I would have take a deep breath and work up the nerve to do it. Mr. Cohen in the above linked article was very lucky to have found someone not too embarrassed to give him what he needed. Giving blood would be far easier for me personally to do. Why? Well, pumping breast milk is a pretty intimate thing, and when I was using breast pumps for my own babies, I did not find it easy at all. It was a technically difficult process, given the technology at the time. (That's why I'm here, promoting what I believe is the best and easiest of all breast pumps.)

But you know, I could get over that initial awkwardness of donating breast milk to an adult. And so could other mothers. I might even be willing to relactate for someone close enough, if it was the only way to save his/her life.

Just like in the beginning, when society was getting used to the idea of the new fangled technologies of donating blood, donating organs, and even donating bone marrow, when people were at first a little queezy with these ideas, enough campaigning could also render donating breast milk to adults, as well as infants, a societal norm.

My own faith in nature (and a higher power) is that it doesn't give us problems without also providing reasonably straightforward and non-toxic ways of solving them, as long as we are open enough to finding them. (That is the journey of growing human knowledge.) Finding that human breast milk fights cancer in the human body fits this paradigm for me just perfectly. :-)

All the Breast,

Suzanne.