Carrie Lauth: Welcome to Natural Moms Talk Radio. I am Carrie Lauth, your host. This week on the show, I am talking with Maribel Hernandez of APMFormulators. She and her husband are the parents of seven home-schooled children and they have compounded an herbal skin salve, a first aid salve, called P&M Dermasalve for families.
Today on the show, we are going to be talking about how parents are the first responders when it comes to health challenges that come up with their children and how you can learn to handle problems at home and even learn natural medicine from home. I can only imagine that with seven kids especially as they get older, you will have plenty of opportunities to practice your skills.
Carrie Lauth: You are back with Carrie at Natural Moms Talk Radio. I am joined this week by Maribel Hernandez of APMFormulators. How are you doing today, Maribel?
Maribel Hernandez: Good. How are you, Carrie?
Carrie Lauth: Very good. I have to say, first of all, that I am enjoying your product that you mailed me. The P&M Dermasalve and I got the chance to use it on my 3-year-old. She fell down and skinned up the inside of her elbow and it has been that way for a few days and I put some of the salve on it last night and this morning, it is looking a whole lot better.
Maribel Hernandez: Well, that is encouraging. That is good to hear.
Carrie Lauth: Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about your background.
Maribel Hernandez: Well, I am a home school mom. I have been home schooling for 18 years and we have seven children from the age 22 to 4.
We started studying family medicine because my husband, Pete, had developed a skin rash and we could not find solutions. When we went to the doctor for this, it was about 1994, the doctor told us that he needed to check liver enzymes. That was confusing because we wondered what does the liver have to do with the skin? Well, we did not understand then, but often times skin creams do show up in elevated liver enzymes.
To make a long story short, we decided why not just start studying family medicine since we home school anyway, put it in the children's curriculum and start doing that with them as well as with ourselves and it led to formulating the P&M Dermasalve, a blog and a newsletter, and some other things.
Carrie Lauth: Is that not one of the neatest things about home schooling that you can incorporate what you are learning as an adult in your life with your children.
Maribel Hernandez: Yeah, that really is true. It is interesting you said that because that is what we do, use the classical approach, and we fit that in with what we are trying to do in our children and you said it. That is why parents -- one of the strong reasons I think parents love home schools. We are not dictated. We are not Ford engine models, we all look alike. We are all different and we come to the table of home schooling with different needs.
In family medicine, families who study family medicine at home from a natural holistic point can capitalize on the weaknesses that their families are experiencing. For example, one family may have issues with gastrointestinal problems. Well, they can curtail their home school curriculum and integrate in a very, very personal way. They can integrate all the medicinal herbs that have medicinal properties through their gastrointestinal problems.
Another parent may say to herself, "Well you know, I really don’t wanna use too many herbs. I wanna understand those long medical words." Well then that family is better suited to learn medical nomenclature, which is just the study of medical language and the diversity goes on and on.
It just allows for so much capability for parents to really, I mean in a very strong way, to really take hold and say, "No, I'm going to do this with my family. My family needs this."
Just recently, we had a wonderful friend come over for dinner. A wonderful lady I love, a good friend, who is a medical doctor and she said, "You know, Maribel, this is so exciting to be able to approach medicine from that end." What she was referring to -- from one on one, "What does Joey need?" "Well, Joey had wryneck the other week and now I have to find out what herb is going to straighten out that muscle and back disorder, so yes, I could not agree with you more.
Home schooling really does not just cater us, we are spoiled, we have so much good to dip into. There is just so much that a parent can take advantage of, but I want to say even parents who are not home schooling, this infrastructure that many are beginning to put into motion for their own family is growing by leaps and bounds. You know that because you do this radio show all the time.
