Yahoo Finance Doctor Recalls Near-Death Experience from Mystery Illness Before Colostrum 'Saved My Life' (Exclusive)
Pediatric neurologist Dr. Sarah Rahal opens up to PEOPLE about her health struggles that led her to creating colostrum brand, ARMRA
Courtesy of Dr. Sarah Rahal
Dr. Sarah RahalPediatric neurologist Dr. Sarah Rahal was busy running her practice in 2017, treating children with chronic health issues as she had been for years.
Then, her own health started to decline.
At the time, she was struggling with gut health issues that left her unable to regularly see her patients one-on-one. “Things started getting worse for me and I was having a lot of unexplained pain that even my smartest doctor colleagues couldn't figure out,” she tells PEOPLE.
With difficulties at work and with her health, Rahal — founder and CEO of ARMRA Colostrum — decided to leave clinical medicine.
“My health had escalated to the point where my entire intestinal tract collapsed in my body and came out of my rectum," she says. "And it was a complication that nobody had ever seen before and we're still not quite sure how that happened, but they could not help me.”
“I needed surgery, but I was too sick to have surgery and I was in the hospital unable to eat or drink anything, just living through IVs,” she continues.
Courtesy of ARMRA
Dr. Sarah RahalAs her health deteriorated and medical professionals failed to diagnose her, Rahal admits she felt very alone and helpless. However, she didn’t want to “give up on myself.”
“It was a very, very dark period for many reasons. I had been really abandoned by my support system. The doctors didn't know what to do with me. There was a lot of denial around me of what was happening,” she explains. “There was only one place that I could turn to find a solution to help myself. And that was myself. There was no solution for me. I had to create it.”
At that point, Rahal spent her days in the hospital researching milk, specifically colostrum. Touted as "liquid gold," colostrum is the first substance that lactating mammals produce, packed with vitamins, minerals, growth factors, and immune-boosting antibodies.
Calling it a “blueprint for the body,” Rahal developed a proprietary cold-chain pasteurization technology to mimic raw dairy products while “preserving the highest bioactive integrity and bioavailability.”
“I'm literally taking calls and doing research papers from the floor of the hospital bathroom,” she says. “I mean, I was near death physically, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically in many ways. But this was my light. It took me almost two years to get this technology set.”
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Courtesy of ARMRA
ARMRA ColostrumThrough her research, Rahal created ARMRA Colostrum in 2020.
“My health is suffering. I’ve lost about 40 pounds. I cannot eat. I am barely getting by at this point. And I said, ‘This is something that could be so helpful for me, for my gut,’” she recalls. “And when I had the first prototype, I put this product into my body and not only could I tolerate it, but I all of a sudden started to be able to tolerate other foods and I was able to gain enough weight and absorb enough nutrients that I could get the surgery that I needed.”
Rahal says “the product saved my life,” and shortly after seeing how much her health improved from it, she wanted to see how much it could help others.
“I made it my mission to get this into as many people's hands as quickly as possible because if I had this in my toolkit earlier, it probably would've saved me the road of suffering and complications that I went down,” she tells PEOPLE, noting that ARMRA Colostrum hit the market in 2021.
Although she never received an official diagnosis for the symptoms that landed her in hospital, Rahal believes she suffered from a connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. However, she says she’s simply grateful and proud of herself for taking her health into her own hands.
“Without the suffering and the struggle that I had, I never would have been compelled to discover this and build what I have, which can now help so many people,” Rahal says, adding that she’s so much healthier today. “So I'm so grateful for the path that I've had. I'm so proud of myself and I'm so proud of that.”
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