Traditional Somali diet of ghee, goat meat, and camel milk cured Hussen’s tuberculosis

Evidence

Hussen’s brothers came to the rescue and took him to their pastoral village to nurse him back to health. He was given traditional treatment for tuberculosis consisting of a substantial amount of clear ghee every morning, a full meal of roasted goat meat for lunch daily, and three cups of fresh camel milk as an afternoon snack. He remained on this diet for six months, which had the intended effect. Within two months he gained much-needed weight and felt very well. Afterward, he moved to Galkayo, where he became an active member of the SYL branch. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 297

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: was his recovery really the diet, or spontaneous improvement? And does Somali pastoral medicine have a recognized tuberculosis protocol?
• SEED: A possible piece on the ignored therapeutic knowledge embedded in pastoral food systems — how a nomadic diet outperformed colonial prison medicine.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 297