"From that time [being cured of his ailments] to the present, I have never ceased to advocate for the milk cure, and of the thousands of cases of chronic disease that have taken this treatment in the manner I recommended, nearly all have been either cured or greatly helped..." -Dr. Charles Sanford Porter
What makes a good doctor?
-The belief that if you give a body the nutrition and support it needs, it will heal itself.
Such a doctor was Charles Sanford Porter. He practiced medicine during the late 1800's through the early 1900's.
His signature protocol was The Milk Cure. Dr. Porter spent over three decades perfecting it.
The Milk Cure protocol consists of the patient consuming large quantities of hygienically produced raw milk and having bed rest for 4 weeks, plus other practices to support maximum vitality and circulation.
The reason his protocol is effective is because you drink SO much milk that your blood volume increases, and therefore the circulation and nutrients going to each cell increase. Weary organs grow in size and vitality. Because you are resting, your body has one thing and one thing only to do, and that is to repair itself.
His book, Milk Diet as a Remedy for Chronic Disease (which has recently been republished) goes into intricate detail about how to achieve the best conditions to support healing, and particulars about various ailments.
It sounds good... but does it work?
Burn Pits in Afghanistan
During college, my husband Kevin had a part time job testing treadmills. He ran 18 miles a day sometimes. He was in great shape.
In 2010 the Vermont Army National Guard deployed to Afghanistan, and he went with them as a geospatial intelligence officer at Bagram Airfield.
Unfortunately, the army had a bad habit of burning all waste because there wasn't a convenient alternative for disposing of it. The burn pits resulted in many soldiers coming home with COPD, including Kevin.
COPD is a lot like asthma. It often results from smoking cigarettes, but it can happen to anyone who gets lung damage from bad air quality. He was prescribed an inhaler just like for asthma. Any time pollen or wildfires in Canada made our air quality bad, he really suffered. A few times when our house got smokey from the wood stove, he would have a bad attack that left him wheezing for days.
I really wanted to heal him. We did all the things... acupuncture, fasting (although he's not as dedicated of a faster as I am...), healthy eating, essential oils... Nothing gave his lungs really impressive, permanent results.
So when he retired in the fall of 2024 and he had time he could dedicate to bed rest, I put him on the Milk Cure.
The Principle
Raw milk is designed by nature to contain every nutrient that a body needs to grow healthy and strong, and to be easily digested and assimilated. There is nothing bad in hygienically produced raw milk that the body has to fight. It is pure goodness.
You can live a full and happy life consuming nothing but raw milk. Dr. Sanford shares documented cases of adults who, for various reasons, lived on raw milk exclusively.
Taken in the large quantity that he stipulates, add bed rest, and it becomes not just sustaining, but therapeutic.
All sorts of chronically ill people benefit from the milk cure. (Whenever I read old books on medicine, the names they used for diseases sound silly to me, but that is only because their vernacular was different from ours. So please excuse the anachronistic sound of his list.)
"Nervous prostration, general debility, auto-intoxication, mild skin troubles... simple anemia, catarrh, biliousness, ringing in the ears, pleurisy, constipation, dyspepsia, indigestion, asthma, hay fever, piles, insomnia, ulcer of the stomach, colitis or ulceration of bowels, goiter, malaria, arterio sclerosis... neuralgia, neurasthenia, tobaccos, morphine and cocaine habits, gallstones and liver disorders, rheumatism, kidney disease, and the first stage of consumption."
I believe that there are many more conditions that can be healed by the milk cure than he mentions in this brief list.
Dr. Porter asserts that if you consume large enough quantities of raw milk, your volume of blood increases, circulation throughout the body improves, and organs enlarge and replenish in vitality. He has you drink it during all waking hours, even if you feel full. Which you will.
Finding the exact amount of milk to drink can be tricky. Too much can result in constipation, while too little can result in diarrhea. He recommends starting with a certain amount based on your body weight, and adjusting up or down by a pint a day to fine tune it. Kevin ended up drinking 2 gallons a day. Most women will need less than that.
His favorite breed of cows for milk was holsteins. He says that jersey milk has too much cream and does not give good results. Holsteins today are wildly different than the ones if his day, but my pre-industrial heritage Lynch lineback cows give milk that is basically the same as what he recommends.
You take warm baths daily, and keep the windows open so that the air you breathe is fresh and clean. (That was a challenge for us doing it in November, but we ran a heater and did it anyway.)
Because you are resting, all energy is focused inward.
He says that it is common for crises in the organs which have been the "seat of the disease" to occur during treatment. I have experienced this myself, in my own healing journey. Do not be alarmed if the very symptoms that you are aiming to heal increase temporarily. That is not a sign that something is going wrong--on the contrary, it is a sign that the organ is healing. It will subside.
If you want to try the Milk Cure, please buy his book so that you can read all of the things he learned in his three decades of coaching patients. There are many details that I am not covering in this blog.
Harder Than You Think
If you think that doing nothing but drinking milk and laying in bed is easy, think again.
My husband was able to do this because he had recently retired, and he hadn't started up his new business yet. Let's be honest, not very many people can just take 4 weeks away from their job. Perhaps if you have a desk job and work from home you could go back to work after the first few days. But for the rest of us, taking off 4 weeks is a hardship.
Dr. Porter encourages you to start with a brief fast. This helps the body clean out and get into healing mode.
After that, for the first few days you are supposed to lay flat and keep the room dark. A family member should bring your milk so that the only activity you perform is going to the bathroom and taking a bath.
Anyone who has hemerrhoids should eat an apple every few days to help things move through smoothly.
After a few days, you may begin to sit up in bed, and within a week the patient may get up to pour their own milk. Of course you can read, watch movies, or play video games. I guess if you like doing those things, you will be in heaven. If you prefer to be active, it is torture.
Even if you love raw milk, you have to drink more than you want. It becomes a bother. You are full but you still have to force more. You will feel for a time like you never want to drink milk again. I am happy to say that Kevin DOES still drink raw milk, now that he is back to normal, even though he threatened that he wouldn't!
Kevin has responsibilities at church, and although he skipped going to Sunday meetings and Wednesday night youth activities for the first couple of weeks, he resumed going before his 4 weeks were up. He was careful to take it easy, though.
By the time he reached 4 weeks, we were all ready for him to get back to normal life.
The Results...
Every night before bed, we recorded several vitals, including his heart rate, weight, and blood oxygen level.
As Dr. Porter said it would, his heart rate increased.
His weight increased, too. He averaged a pound a day of weight gain--about 30 pounds over the course of 4 weeks! I know that most people do not want to gain weight, but please don't let that scare you. First of all, much of that is blood volume, muscle, and organ growth. Increased blood volume and organ vitality is the key to how this protocol works. Second, he was forcing large amounts of milk while not exercising, so yes, he did put on some fat. But after he finished the protocol and went back to normal diet and activity, his waistline naturally went back to where it had been prior to the milk cure.
For the first 3 weeks of doing the milk cure, his blood oxygen remained around 94%, which is considered low. Mine usually measures at 99%. During the last week, I was so excited that it suddenly jumped up... He began having 98% blood oxygen! That's the highest it has ever measured since Afghanistan.
Something got better.
A few days after he finished the 4 week protocol, our chimney didn't draft properly and the house filled up with smoke pretty badly.
IT. DIDN'T. BOTHER. HIM.
That was exactly the sort of thing that would have sent him into a bad wheezing attack only a few weeks before.
At the time of writing this blog, we are doing some construction in the kitchen and he is creating all sorts of dust. It is bothering my lungs, and my lungs don't normally mind a reasonable amount of dust. I am complaining about it, but it's not bothering him. That is huge!
There have been a couple of times that he has been exercising out in the winter air and he has had a slight wheeze afterward, but it has been mild and hasn't seems to bother him.
So is he 100% better? Maybe not. It's hard to measure his improvement empirically and quantify how much better he is. But at worst, I would say he is 70% improved. I think it might be as much as 90% better.
The fact that bad air quality no longer affects his ability to have good quality of life is priceless.
All I can say is, raw milk is truly medicine.
And a big, heart felt thank you to my cows who provided this healing to my husband.
What do you think, would you like to try the Milk Cure?
Comments