Originally published July 2014
A few months ago I came across the idea of using camel’s milk as an alternative for children with allergies to cow’s milk. Camel milk is a healthy dairy alternative, having only a 5% cross reaction with cow milk. This was particular interesting to me, since Little Wiggles had reacted to both cow’s milk, and goat’s milk. She was tolerating sheep’s milk in my diet while breastfeeding, but if she failed it directly, I would have had to stop drinking it, and all my pumped milk would no longer be safe. As I did more research on camel milk and how to acquire it, I learned that some parents have used it in non-verbal autistic children, and seen gains in speech. Since at that time Little Wiggles was 14 months old, with no words, that sounded promising. So I found a farm selling camel milk and placed my first order.
After the food trial for camel milk was successful, I came across another piece of interesting information. Some doctors in Israel did a study on using camel milk to heal allergies in children. The 8 children in the study were given camel milk exclusively for 14 days, then given food and camel milk. At the end of the study, all 8 children were completely healed of their allergies!
We are doing 14 days of gut rest with Little Wiggles, similar to the protocol in the study above. We don’t have enough camel milk to meet all her calorie needs, but for two weeks she is only eating her safe meat, duck eggs, and camel milk. The first two days successfully stopped diarrhea that had been ongoing for 24 days, so that was great. It has been 3 months since we first started the camel milk, and she is definitely talking now :). We have been doing speech therapy also, so I can’t give camel milk all the credit, but it does seem to have helped. Also since adding camel’s milk I stopped breastfeeding and Little Wiggles gained 10 percentiles on her weight chart. This means she is back at the growth curve she was born on.
Camel milk has gotten even easier to find in the last few months. Whole Foods carries it in California, or you can order it online.