Netflix‘s new show Apple Cider Vinegar is based on a true story so grotesquely shocking that you might actually wish none of it ever happened. The series follows the rise and fall of Aussie influencer Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), a young woman who claimed she had been able to keep her stage four brain cancer at bay with healthy eating, positivity, and other alternative medicine buzzwords. The twist is that Belle is lying about all of it just to boost her brand, monetize her app, and sell her cookbooks. However, what’s all the more twisted is that one of Belle’s contemporaries, Milla Blake (Alcyia Debnam-Carey), is based on a real life cancer patient who rose to fame touting a regime of juicing and, uh, coffee enemas to squash her cancer.
While the idea of healthy eating to promote good health is nothing new, Milla’s devotion to coffee enemas might take you a bit aback. Apple Cider Vinegar doesn’t even offer it as a one-time quirk in the story. Throughout the series, we see Milla laying on the floor in her bathroom for one of the five coffee enemas she gives herself a day. When her mother’s health turns, she insists on giving the poor woman one of these at-home fixes. We even get a doctor attempting to dissuade Milla from treating her mother’s bowel cancer this way because the physician has seen patients scald their literal asses off trying them.
So what is a coffee enema? Do coffee enemas work? (Spoiler: nope!) And why do people really turn to coffee enemas to cure their diseases? Here’s everything you need to know about coffee enemas in the Apple Cider Vinegar show…
Apple Cider Vinegar: What Are Coffee Enemas? Do They Work?
If you’ve seen Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar, you’ll know that Alycia Debnam-Carey plays a beautiful and charming editor named Milla Blake. When Milla is diagnosed with cancer at age 22 and told she has to have her arm amputated, she desperately looks for another option. Milla stumbles upon the “Hirsch Institute,” a mecca of alternative medicine in Tijuana, Mexico. Hirsch Therapy demands that Milla follow a dead German doctor’s book and live off organic juices and coffee enemas. This will cure her body and her cancer.
The character of Milla is a clear stand-in for real-life “Wellness Warrior” Jess Aincough, an Aussie influencer who turned to Gerson Therapy to battle her epithelioid sarcoma. Like Hirsch, Gerson has a home base in Mexico, was invented by a German doctor, and pushes clean eating and free trade coffee enemas.
Okay, but what are coffee enemas?
Giving yourself a coffee enema means you are literally putting coffee up your butt via a plastic tube. The idea is you are detoxing your body by flushing out impurities from your colon. People who use coffee enemas claim they do everything from cure constipation to cancer.
However, there is ZERO medical data to support this. Like, it does NOT work!
Spoilers for Apple Cider Vinegar, but the coffee enemas definitely don’t cure Milla’s cancer. Like her real life counterpart, Jess Ainscough, Milla dies when her cancer returns. Not only that, but Milla’s mother dies in agony pursuing the alternative medical treatment. It’s a tragic ending for characters who are otherwise so kind, so loving, and so hopeful that they might be able to find a cure for their cancer.
The long and short of it is there is no medical reason to put coffee up your butt — especially if you have cancer. Maybe just stick to putting your coffee in your body through the other end?
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