Cathy Meehan: Hey everyone, it’s Cathy Meehan and today I am excited that we get to introduce our community to Saundra Traywick. So, what’s special about Saundra Traywick? Well, I’ll tell you guys, I never thought I’d be talking about donkey milk on a podcast, but this woman is amazing. She is a resource and I want to introduce you all to Saundra so that she can talk to us about donkey milk. So Saundra, how in the world did you get to where you are? Can you give us a little bit of a background?
Saundra Traywick: Well, first thank you for having me on. It is always humbling when people like you take the time to interview us and get our story. So I want to thank you for that and for everything the example you have been of courage. I’m just so—you’re a blessing to our state and to the children and the families that you help. So, thank you.
Cathy Meehan: Thank you.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah, absolutely. The question, how did we get here? Is that what you’re asking?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. How much time do we have?
Saundra Traywick: Well, it was totally God that we always have to give him the credit because this was not a part of our plan. When our daughter was 6 years old, she was totally normal and very creative and very brilliant and doing all the things. And one day she woke up and she had extreme—actually the first symptom we noticed was extreme body odor and she was six. And then separation anxiety and then OCD washing her hands until they were chapped and nearly bleeding. hallucinations waking up in the middle of the night seeing spiders and bugs and snakes on the ceilings. And this was all within about 24 to 48 hours. So it was terrifying.
Cathy Meehan: Oh goodness.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. And she was very, very creative and very artistic. She lost her ability to do her artwork and her—I would read them very high-level books and she couldn’t comprehend. I had to go back to simple, simple like fairy tale type picture books and she couldn’t even comprehend those. She had—by OCD we’re talking about things like I would prepare her food and take it to the table and she would say, “Well, you touched the edge of the counter and then you touched my plate and then you touched my cup and so it’s all contaminated” and wouldn’t be able to eat it. And so, and that’s a six-year-old, you know, and then the Chick-fil-A person handed her her cup and they touched her straw. And that’s not something a six-year-old would think through that this has germs and bacteria. So those all came on within about 48 hours. And terrifying.
I was researching and you know—and prior to this I was already a crunchy mom. So I was already one of those that did the things right. You know I’ve had a lot of people say, “Oh, this happened to you because XYZ. You did this and this and this.” And you know, I was grinding my own wheat flour. I grew up on a farm in Kansas, you know, I was—we didn’t eat processed foods, so it—it was a shock and we were already very healthy, didn’t have her—she had not been really sick at all, all of the things. So, this came out of nowhere and we were one of the very fortunate and blessed few that got a diagnosis early.
We took her to a couple different doctors and I was very careful. We had just moved and I didn’t have a pediatrician yet where we were. I was terrified if I took her into a pediatrician, they would take her away from me and say we had abused her. And this happens because, you know, overnight symptoms—
Cathy Meehan: They’ll say, “Oh, you’ve abused your child.” Or something like that.
Saundra Traywick: So, we went back to our pediatrician who knew us and I actually told him what was going on and said, “I need you to test her for strep throat.” She had no fever, no symptoms of strep throat. None of the things that you would say she has strep except she had really horrible breath at this point. And I thought that breath was because she was also terrified her toothbrush was contaminated and I was struggling to get her to brush her teeth. And we were about a week in at this point. Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Then he said, “No, that’s strep breath.” And she came back with raging strep.
Saundra Traywick: which we didn’t have any symptoms of. So of course at that point we put her on antibiotics for the strep and we were told, “Oh, you’re going to be fine. She has PANDAS disorder—Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Strep. Get her on some antibiotics. She’ll be fine.” Which we were ecstatic because at this point I’m thinking she has a brain tumor. You know, something horrible has happened and we’re never going to get her back.
Cathy Meehan: So yeah to hear, “Oh, we can just put her on a round of antibiotics and she’ll be fine.”
Saundra Traywick: And I was like, “Oh, wow. This is great.” Well, wasn’t that easy. We actually started the antibiotics and some new symptoms popped up. So, a blinking tic, like blinking like that. Rapid, rapid eye blinking. She had a vocal tic of sorts where she would have to say “maybe” after everything she said. which now I know that was her a fear of telling a lie. And so she couldn’t state even, “I’d like a drink of water maybe,” because she was afraid it wasn’t 100% true. And when you know—you hear about these hallucinations and things—a nightmare.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: It was—it was truly a nightmare. And you know we had never exposed her to anything scary. So VeggieTales was as scary as it got, you know, and so for her to be seeing these things and hearing, you know, we were doing praying, praying, praying. And unfortunately the antibiotics did not just clear it like we had hoped. And so I was calling at the time—you know, she’s 17 now. She was 6 years old then. So most doctors didn’t know what it was. A lot of parents were being discredited, told they were crazy, this didn’t exist, and that, you know, an infection cannot cause the brain—Are we—are we connected or am I losing you?
Cathy Meehan: Are you there? We’re connected. Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: Okay. Yours is getting all fuzzy to me.
Cathy Meehan: Oh, that’s okay. It—it’s okay. It’ll get a little fuzzy, but the final recording it—it should be fine. So then I’ll just start.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. Continue with—
Cathy Meehan: Okay. Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: So we started looking for a pediatrician that understood PANDAS and would be able to treat her. And unfortunately the nearest I found that was a PANDAS expert at the time was in Arkansas or Texas. So I called both of them and the one in Arkansas they said, “Oh, we won’t be able to see you for, uh, 3 months, you know, wait list.” And we were also waiting for an MRI.
Cathy Meehan: Oh goodness.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. Our—our pediatrician still wanted to rule out potentially a brain tumor. So he put us on the list for an MRI. It was about 4 months before we got called for that MRI. I—and we had good insurance, all this. I’m thinking, what is wrong with the system where they suspect a potential brain tumor and we can’t get her in for an MRI for 4 months? At that point, we had 100% confirmation it was PANDAS disorder.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: So, we didn’t—we didn’t need to do the MRI, but you know that—that a virus or a bacteria, you know, now they’re saying other things can trigger these same types of behaviors and symptoms where the immune system essentially attacks the brain and causes, you know, neuroinflammation. But I called and they said, “Well, there’s this wait list to even get in to see this doctor.” And I said, “Well, tell me how are you going to treat? Are you going to put her on antipsychotic drugs?” And they said, “Well, yeah, that’s what—that’s how we treat this.” And I said, “Well, I don’t need an appointment because why would I treat the symptoms when this is clearly an inflam—inflammation? Why are we treating symptoms?”
So, canceled all that and I called National Institute of Health and I said, “Okay,” because I found some great research on their website at the time talking about it and they were doing a trial of IVIG on kids with PANDAS, but you could potentially also get the placebo ’cause this is a trial. And if it—if you weren’t in the trial, you know how much it costs. I think it’s about $10,000 a treatment and insurance doesn’t cover it because insurance didn’t believe it even existed.
Cathy Meehan: Which is handy.
Saundra Traywick: So, they said, “Well, our best guess is IVIG or antibiotics every day till she’s 18 or 21.” And I’m sitting there going, “Well, if the experts are guessing, then we can pray and we can do our own research and we can see what—what the Lord leads us to.” So that’s what we did. And I started actually looking at what are autistic parents doing because I was seeing some amazing reports from some autistic parents that were, you know, helping their child to have the best quality of life possible.
And so what I found was a graph with two circles and they overlapped and it had PANDAS and autism and the overlap, you know, in the middle of similar symptoms and whatnot. And so I thought, well, let’s see what they’re doing. And one of the things I found was camel milk.
And so this is a really long story. I’m trying to shorten it up. But we actually started her and we did—we did it all wrong. Yeah, I mean I was—I was terrified that, you know how when you move in a new house you have about three months where you want to get everything perfect and then after that three-month period you’re like, eh it’s fine.
Cathy Meehan: You know I didn’t get that picture hung but I don’t really need it.
Saundra Traywick: I—
Cathy Meehan: It’s just—it’s just going to be that way.
Saundra Traywick: You—
Cathy Meehan: You, it’s just going to be that way.
Saundra Traywick: You get used to something. And I did not want to get used to my daughter as normal. I didn’t want to forget what she had been like before this. Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: I was just—that wasn’t acceptable.
Saundra Traywick: And so we threw everything at it but the kitchen sink. I mean, I did homeopathy with a practitioner in New York. We did completely paleo, gluten-free, and no, there weren’t any cookbooks back then. And I didn’t even know. Somebody told me, “Oh, you just need to cut out all these foods.” So my husband got home and I had huge laundry baskets outside full of all our food.
Cathy Meehan: And he was like, “What are we going to eat?”
Saundra Traywick: I don’t know, but we can’t eat any of that anymore because it’s got corn in it. It’s got grain in it. And I grew up—nuts.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. I was like, here’s some nuts. Sorry.
Saundra Traywick: That’s what you get. Nuts and water. So, we all ended up—yeah. So, it was just very—it was a very intense time frame. And I—I was doing raw milk: raw cow milk, raw goat milk, raw cow colostrum. And then we actually found a naturopath that recommended the camel milk. So, I found a source for raw camel milk and did get some of that and that seemed to be very helpful.
And I’m not discounting any of the other things we did, the nutrition—all of that was critical. So, what I did was kind of backwards in that we did everything all at once. And then I started eliminating things and seeing what was a real—what—what we still needed. Maybe we needed some of those things as part of our stair steps to get where we were. But like one time we gave her a hamburger with a gluten bun and oh my goodness, it turned into rages and all the things. I was like, “Okay, still got to stay gluten-free. Still have to stay paleo. That’s important.” So, we phased out some of the homeopathy.
Cathy Meehan: Didn’t seem to make a difference.
Saundra Traywick: I still use homeopathy, but maybe it did the healing that it needed to do and—and then we didn’t need it anymore at that level. So, you know, the camel milk seemed to be a—a pretty big instrumental step for us. And we actually went to a farm here in Oklahoma that had camels and had a crazy experience there. Turns out they can be very dangerous. So, I called this doctor that had—naturopath that had—yeah. I called the naturopath. I said, “Could we milk a alpaca or something that doesn’t have jaws that will crush your skull?” And literally—and she said, “Well, try donkey milk. Some kids do better with that.” So, we tried donkey milk. And within—
Cathy Meehan: Okay.
Saundra Traywick: Donkey milk.
Cathy Meehan: Donkey milk.
Saundra Traywick: And so, within the first dose, about 30 to 40 minutes later, she said, “I love you, daddy,” for the first time since onset months before. And that was—that’s the reason.
Cathy Meehan: Wow. Interesting.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. And so started your donkey milk journey.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. She had not been able to—
Saundra Traywick: That’s incredible. So—so what is it?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. What—what is the difference between donkey milk, camel milk, cow’s milk, goats milk? What is it that makes donkey milk like the—the gold of when you’re looking for milk for—or you know, therapies? What is it?
Saundra Traywick: So I would actually—this is probably going to surprise people, but I would not say donkey milk is what I would always go to. So donkey milk is the closest of any milk to human breast milk in composition, but it is lower fat than breast milk. It is very high lysozyme content. Great other—lactoferrin, immunoglobulins. So—what we see for a lot of autoimmune stuff, I—anecdotally because I’m not a doctor—is just pretty amazing.
But very interesting—a few years later, my younger daughter became type 1 diabetic. And this is extremely frustrating, you know, because here we are doing all the things. And I actually think that, you know, a lot of it is what we’re being exposed to inadvertently because these are things that were not in our family before. None of this autoimmune stuff. You know, what’s going on—epigenetics?
Cathy Meehan: Right? No family history, right?
Saundra Traywick: No. And now two for two of my kids both have chronic childhood—
Cathy Meehan: It is a toxic world.
Saundra Traywick: It is. It is.
Cathy Meehan: So, interestingly though, what I learned—
Saundra Traywick: So crazy because—
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: So, I was in the hospital with my younger daughter now with—in ketoacidosis, type 1 diabetic, and I’m telling the doctors, I was like, “Well, have you guys looked at camel milk?” Because camel milk, there’s amazing research on camel milk for type 1 diabetes. However, we do not want to milk camels. So there is no one in our area that milks camels in Oklahoma. So there is someone in Missouri. There are some other people that will actually ship camel milk, but camel milk for type 1 diabetics has a very high insulin content which is super interesting. However, it is not—
Cathy Meehan: Interesting. Okay.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. It is not as tasty as donkey milk. In our opinion, donkey milk is pretty sweet. And—
Cathy Meehan: Well, what were you going to say?
Saundra Traywick: I can only imagine what they said when—if you’re going into, you know, any type of a clinic or a hospital setting and you are suggesting uh—you know, something that’s completely out of the box. That—you know, we—we find that every day, we hear the stories of where, you know, people are just like—literally, there are alternative solutions to so many things, but our pediatricians and our health care system or our sick care system is so molded into this box with non-critical thinkers. All they can do is memorize symptoms and spit out a pharmaceutical drug and you try to introduce something like camel milk or donkey milk and they—it’s just pathetic how they instantly write you off.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. And reaction.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. We’ve got to stop that.
Cathy Meehan: Absolutely. I got lectured when I was in the hospital with her because I ordered her a low carb meal for breakfast and they came in to tell me, “You cannot control this with diet.” And you need like—so I’m supposed to order her some high fructose corn syrup uh—on some pancakes and that—you know, I mean, shocking. And the—yeah.
Saundra Traywick: So, they had training you had to go through before you could go home with your child. And the book with the training had in it how to figure your insulin with a McDonald’s lunch. All of these foods from McDonald’s. And I said—
Cathy Meehan: “So they can eat their happy meal.”
Saundra Traywick: Exactly. Exactly. So this, you know, this is the carb count for all of these things. And I said, “Well, where is the training that’s going to tell me how to figure what we ate paleo?” And I—I made everything from scratch. So I said, “How am I going to prepare a meal and prepare this, you know, off of a recipe and figure out what the carbs are from this recipe?”
Saundra Traywick: And oh, that’s part of the training. It was nowhere. Nowhere. So I literally left and I had to go to the store and buy a bunch of prepared foods for my daughter because they had carb counts. And we didn’t—never buy that kind of thing.
Cathy Meehan: No, it—it was horrible.
Saundra Traywick: I—I was—I don’t know how to—I don’t know how to eat, and so that was another eye-opening experience. But you know, and she is insulin dependent now and we have brought in the camel milk and done some other things, you know, but unfortunately at this point she has to have insulin and that’s not to say that the Lord won’t heal her someday, but it’s very frustrating to be—you know, in a situation where you are dependent on a pharmaceutical to live and—not where we are. So—but grateful for it because that’s what we have right now.
But the donkey milk, there’s some really amazing research on it for type 1 diabetes—I mean, type 2 diabetes. So for camel milk, type 1 is very interesting. The research is out there on it. Super interesting. And for type 2 diabetes, there’s some really fun interest research on it for type 2 on donkey.
Cathy Meehan: Oh yeah, that’s great. It—I mean, how interesting that God puts this in your family, right? And then you—you take your experience, you find some solutions.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: And—and then now you are able to be—you’re in a position where you literally share this with other people and parents and communities and even practitioners so that they’ve got options. And so, how did you like transition into, okay, now that we’ve gathered all this information, we’ve had some successes, what made you, you know, bring that to the forefront so that you could tell other people about it?
Saundra Traywick: Well, at the time, you know, this was over—a long time ago, years ago. So—
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: At the time there was a small—I found a small Facebook group of about 40 parents that were saying, “We don’t want to put our kids on antipsychotic drugs and we’re going to do everything we can and try and figure out how to do this more naturally.” So, it was like the—the crunchy mom little chat group and it was actually there was a amazing homeopath and it was Saving Our PANDAS and she was sharing, you know, what she was doing homeopathically and I was sharing how donkey milk was helping us and some of the other parents were sharing, you know, different things. I mean, it was—this was years ago and we were talking about the—let’s talk about the nicotine patches. I mean, so years ago before the nicotine patches was a thing. And when they brought it up, I was like, we were talking about that like in 2006 or whatever. It was like—it was crazy. We were—anything that—
Cathy Meehan: Catch-up everybody.
Saundra Traywick: Oh, yeah. Like, we—we were on to that, you know, and people would say, “Well, how would you do it?” We said, “We don’t care if it’s Twinkies that will help our kids. If it’s helping our kids, do it.” And so that little group grew, but at the time it was just a core group of a few moms that were saying, “What’s helping you? What’s helping you? What can we share with each other? If you’re going to see a doctor, what are they telling you?” And we just really shared a lot there. And then we started with three American Mammoth donkeys and they’re critically endangered and so we got them in Texas and we had no idea what we were doing. And so, you know, had to help.
Cathy Meehan: And you literally just bought your own donkeys.
Saundra Traywick: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Cathy Meehan: You bought your own donkeys?
Saundra Traywick: Yes. Okay. Okay. I had never—yeah. No.
Cathy Meehan: Who does that?
Saundra Traywick: You do. That’s great. Well, what options do you have? I mean, this is helping our kid and she has to have it.
Cathy Meehan: I guess. I mean, I guess I would do the same thing, right?
Saundra Traywick: Go buy a donkey. Yeah. And that’s what you do. And so, we didn’t have any idea what we were doing. We had never milked anything in our lives and these donkeys have never been milked and so it was—crazy experience. Thankfully, they’re very smart animals and gentle and we didn’t die. So there were a few times a little bit sketchy.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: So we started milking and I was also along the road to this because of my daughter’s handwashing and I started researching like we talked about all the toxins and—you know, she was using—I was a hand pump soap antibacterial, so it just stripped her hands and that was part of the reason, you know, her hands were shredded.
Cathy Meehan: Of the microbiome on your hands, right?
Saundra Traywick: She was washing them constantly out of this, you know, fear and this body odor. I knew that I was not going to put toxic deodorant on her. So, I started looking at—I’m going to make my own. And so, I started trying out different formulations to make my own deodorant that was non-toxic ’cause I knew she needed to sweat. And I—it was actually, I believe, her body trying to detox which was where that body odor came from.
Cathy Meehan: Right.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. Detox.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: And so I started when we got our own donkeys—I started making my own skin care out of it. So, I made soap and I made a moisturizer and you know—I’m going to eliminate toxins and I started giving it to friends and then we realized we had a mammoth feed bell and so I—with the girls, I designed a cute little soap box and they were like, “No mom, it needs more color. It needs more color,” you know, they’re six and four years old. And so I was coloring it in and hand-drew the whole soap box and everything. We ended up taking it to some stores and got it in the Made in Oklahoma program. And then we got on the news and all of a sudden we had people all around the United States calling us for donkey milk and we had three donkeys. And so we were very—and I would not break the law. I will not break the law. If—if someone is willing to break the law to do something for you, you have to say, are they—what other thing are they going to—is it real donkey milk? You know, is it—if they’re compromising on this, then will they compromise on?
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, that’s interesting. You mentioned law and donkey milk because I know here in like Oklahoma we have laws against milk and you know whether you can buy fresh milk and things like that. So yeah, how did that impact what you do with donkey milk?
Saundra Traywick: Yeah, so actually yeah, we looked into that and in Oklahoma the law is—
Cathy Meehan: Right.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah, you do have to pick up all raw milk at the farm. Raw milk is absolutely legal in Oklahoma. People don’t know about it because it’s illegal to advertise that you have raw cow milk. So, if you can’t advertise your product, how would anyone know that you have it?
And so, I looked though—and—and the law in Oklahoma said cow milk and goat milk. Nothing about donkey milk. So, we were able to share our story on the news. We’ve been in Southern Living magazine and because donkey milk was not a part of the law, I was able—we—we’ve had people reach out: “I saw you in Southern Living. I—I—this—this is what’s happening with my grandchild and they’ve never been diagnosed properly.” So because I was able to use my legal right to freedom of speech to share the way the Lord blessed us through donkey milk, children have been diagnosed properly when doctors had missed it. We have helped increase awareness about this disorder around the United States and shared our faith about it in—in this process.
And so along with all of this, we were fighting some environmental battles because knowing about toxins and whatnot. And I inadvertently, naively poked a bear that I did not realize was some of the most important—notant—some of the most powerful people in our state were involved. And so I was, you know—
Cathy Meehan: Yeah, I see something wrong and I’m gonna try to fix it and make sure that other kids are healthy.
Saundra Traywick: And so I was making a lot of noise about this. And the next thing we knew, we had the state and the federal agents showing up at our farm and legislators were running bills trying to—
Cathy Meehan: Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. Legislators ran a bill to—
Cathy Meehan: Trying to regulate your donkey milk. Is that what it was? Yeah.
Saundra Traywick: To regulate our donkey milk, which would have then put us in the category of not being able to advertise, not being able to tell anyone about our raw milk. ASo we fought that and totally—the Lord—it was stopped before it was made law, but it went through all the process and almost became a law. And since then, we’ve had another piece of legislation ran against us, which also did not make it through, thank the Lord. So we—we learned really quick and—
Cathy Meehan: Amen. Right.
Saundra Traywick: But part of what happened through that was our next shipment of freeze-dried because we started importing donkey milk. Sorry, I’m kind of going in circles here—when we could not ship because we wouldn’t—
Cathy Meehan: No, that’s okay ’cause I’m sure the demand—
Saundra Traywick: Right. Yes.
Cathy Meehan: Yeah. The demand’s got to be huge.
Saundra Traywick: Yes. Mhm. And so I’d have people call me and they would be from Turkey, but they had moved to the United States. And they’d say, “Well, in my country, the doctor would have recommended we do donkey milk along with chemotherapy.” And—and I need donkey milk to go along with—’cause they were dealing with whatever issues they had. And I would say, “Well, I cannot ship it to you.” And they would—some of them would put this guilt trip on me like, “Well, you could save my life if you will do this for me.” And I can’t. It’ll—I’ll break the law and then I’ll shut down and I can’t help anyone else. It was horrible. And I mean, you start to put yourself in this thing saying, you know, am I doing the right thing by doing the right thing?
And so we—the Lord led us to amazing farm in the Azores, Portugal—the islands of Azores in the middle of the Atlantic. And we brought in their freeze-dried low temperature pasteurized donkey milk and it was having amazing results. And so we now offer that—that we can ship anywhere in the United States and we also have our raw milk here at the farm.
Cathy Meehan: Wow.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. So the problem is our freeze-dried milk is so—
Cathy Meehan: Absolutely.
Saundra Traywick: But the problem we’re finding out is the freeze-dried milk is so good that people don’t want to drive out to the farm and get raw milk. So like, well, you know—
Cathy Meehan: Well, well, now I’ve been to your farm and if you’re anywhere near Oklahoma, you need to go visit the farm because it is one of the coolest places that—that you will ever see. And yeah, your farm is phenomenal. I love it. Thank you.
Saundra Traywick: We look and see all the work that we need to do.
Cathy Meehan: You do farm tours.
Saundra Traywick: We don’t for groupely, yeah. But most of the time I just tell people to wait and they will come for the health event that you were here for. So the health event is—
Cathy Meehan: The best way to—
Saundra Traywick: And we’ll talk about that. Mhm. Yeah. So it’s a lot of fun and we have a lot of babies and—
Cathy Meehan: So that’s great. Oh, so cute. So, you have the ability to ship all over the United States the freeze-dried donkey milk and then or people can actually pick it up raw at your farm in Oklahoma.
Saundra Traywick: So, okay, that’s—I mean, what a—what a resource. Isn’t it just so amazing how God works? And I mean, and I’m so sorry that your daughters and your whole family had to go through this tragedy and nightmare. And you know, I just—it’s always, you know, God’s plan always turns it into something beautiful, right? And just like—which is like so amazing. And I mean, I can just tell—I mean, you were a mom that was going to take control and you were going to take this, you know, bad thing and turn it into something good. And I mean, thank goodness for you.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: And how has that journey been for your whole family? I mean, what’s your husband thinking? Oh, well, he’s the one actually milking the donkeys. So, it’s a lot of work.
Saundra Traywick: Okay. Yeah. It’s a labor for sure.
Cathy Meehan: I bet.
Saundra Traywick: So, but we love it. It is. And then, but I—I want to talk briefly about your skin products, too. So, it—I’m assuming they’re donkey milk skin products. And then, are those available for people to purchase? Um, and—and like—
Saundra Traywick: I mean tell me something about those. So, okay, we have these. It’s probably backwards, but that’s our soap. And then—
Cathy Meehan: That’s all right.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. Okay. And then our deodorant. Actually, the deodorant does not have donkey milk in it, but it’s natural and it, you know, you’re still going to sweat. Sweat is good. You know, you need to detox through sweating. You don’t want to block that pathway. So, you don’t need to smell while you sweat. That’s kind of the point. You don’t want to smell. So, and then we have our freeze-dried. This is—
Cathy Meehan: Right. Right.
Saundra Traywick: That’s for our freeze-dried donkey milk. And then our raw milk comes in a glass jar and it’s frozen. They can let us know ahead of time and we can do fresh, not frozen yet. One of the things —
Cathy Meehan: Mhm.
Saundra Traywick: So, I have to be careful because we’re not doctors, but most people do not drink this like you would cow milk. So, I’ve heard that in Europe they recommend about a cup a day therapeutic for a, you know, that’s what they would call for an adult dose, which we’ve seen the best results in the morning and in the evening. So splitting that out. But I would never tell someone to start with that because I don’t know if it’s because we are so toxic or because we don’t detox well. They need to be seeing someone like you to know how—how their detox pathways work and make sure that they don’t end up over. You know what I always say, you know, if they don’t know what a Herxheimer reaction is or die-off symptoms are not fun and it’s actually not good.
So, you know, because it is and there’s research to back up it’s antifungal, antibacterial, antiparasitic, and you do not want to overdo and then your body to have a bad, you know, Herxheimer type reaction because you’re reabsorbing toxins instead of—
Cathy Meehan: So, you know, we have people that tell me, right, they’d take a teaspoon or a tablespoon, you know, or even like a shot glass.
Saundra Traywick: Some people have to start at a very low dose and they can stay there. It’s expensive. So if you take a very small amount and you see a great result with a very, very small amount, then do that. You don’t need to work up to more. If you want to work up to more and that’s what you need, then try it and see what works for you. But there really is not like a magic “take this amount,” you know?
Saundra Traywick: So I—I’m always very—you’re going to have to try—Well, with—yeah.
Cathy Meehan: And—and with anything, which you know, I—I probably need to make that disclaimer is if you’re going to do any type of a treatment or therapy, remedy or anything, whether it’s natural or even pharmaceutical, you need to make sure that you are under the advice of a physician or a practitioner and work with them because you’re right, one dose for one person or one, you know, one amount is—is going to be completely different than somebody else’s. And you know, they really need to have like your—your history, make sure your detox pathways are good. And there is—it’s not just like, “Oh, hey, I can call and order some donkey milk and start drinking it.” And we’re not saying that to anybody, but this is a resource for when that is something that you might want to try. And I’m sure that you also, you know, you probably have a list of providers for people in the area that you can recommend. And obviously, so there’s the disclaimer. This is not—
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: —but it is—
Saundra Traywick: Cover our butts on that.
Cathy Meehan: Exactly.
Saundra Traywick: Because that is one of the things they try to do is say, “You’re practicing medicine.” And I’m always like, “No, I’m just a mom. This is what works for us.” And it’s milk. It is just milk. So, you know, on the one hand, I’ll have people email me and say, “This is my list of drugs that I’m on, and will this counteract with it?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s milk.” Like, when it comes down to it, it’s just milk.
Cathy Meehan: It’s milk.
Saundra Traywick: So, you can talk to your doctor about if it’s, you know, you know, ’cause also kids that are on antibiotics, it would be like the probiotics, you know, do you want to take at the same time, different time, how do you want to do that? You need to work with your doctor and see what’s going to work for you. So, you know, we always try to tell people also it is totally different and people that say it’s the same as camel milk or it’s the same. No, it’s not because we have very, very rarely—and all the research had said no one’s ever been allergic to donkey milk. We’ll leave it to Americans.
And so now I’ve actually had people say, you know, they have had an allergic reaction. It’s true, but like allergic—and one case it was very interesting and I warned them ahead of time. They came and they got our raw milk and they said our daughter was anaphylactic to IVIG, which is immunoglobulins, and I said, “Okay, well be very careful with the donkey milk because it’s very high in immunoglobulins,” and they—they were from I think Missouri and they texted me later that night and sure enough, their daughter had been allergic to the donkey milk.
So at that point, okay, and we actually had a re—a company that does IVIG and they were interested in this because IVIG is very expensive. So, if you’re going to throw out $10,000 for IVIG, they said they started saying, “Well, maybe we should test them with a—a package of donkey milk first and see if they’re allergic to the immunoglobulins in the donkey,” because you could save them, you know, if it—and it would be something someone would have to research to see if it’s always that way or if this was just a fluke of a case because and it’s very, very rare, but usually when I ask him, I say, “Can your child drink cow milk, goat milk?” “Oh, yeah, no problem.” So, I think that’s actually a great testimony, too, that donkey milk is very different than cow milk or goat milk or anything else. You can’t just put, you know—breast milk is very different than cow milk and cows have four stomachs. We have one, you know, and donkeys have one stomach. And I always go back to, all right, Jesus rode on a donkey. So there’s—there’s, you know, the only animal mammal that spoke.
Cathy Meehan: There you go.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah. The only mammal that spoke in the Bible was a donkey and it saved someone’s life. So I love just looking at all the different things and going, you know, maybe—maybe part of it all is also, you know, a belief.
Cathy Meehan: Maybe there’s something to that.
Saundra Traywick: Yes, absolutely. Who knows?
Cathy Meehan: But it’s fun.
Saundra Traywick: Yeah.
Cathy Meehan: Well, that’s—that’s a big part of it, you know, especially when, you know, we deal with parents that have children that—I mean, sometime you just feel so helpless because what can you do? I mean, we didn’t go to medical school. We don’t know what’s going on. There’s so many resources out there. I mean, you have to have hope and you have to have faith and you know, and I—I’m just—I’m so glad that you are able to, number one, you provide people with the hope and with your own testimony, you know, that they can build their faith and I personally believe, you know, everything happens. It’s—it’s God’s plan and the way we work through things and how we can help and encourage one another. That’s really, you know, I mean, I think that’s our purpose. I’m in the every day, I wake up and I’m like, “God, you know, heal me and make me be the vessel for your healing.” And how can we get information out to other parents?
