Carrie Lauth: Yeah. Well, when you were talking about the liver and the skin it reminded me of something that my husband told me several years ago. He is not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to natural medicine or health issues, but he was taking paint classes with the 3M Corporation and they instructed him to be very, very careful when he is working with solvents and to always use gloves and to protect his skin and they showed him some information about how when the solvent touches your skin, you can find it in your liver within eight seconds and I thought, "That is just remarkable."

Maribel Hernandez: That is amazing. I did not know that, how quick that was and that is just really -- it is scary, of course. It is scary to us as moms. We love our husbands and we love our precious children. We do not want anything to happen to them.

Carrie, it was frustrating that the doctor never even told me. He never said, "Pete and Maribel, I have to do these liver enzymes tests," but I found that out years later when we started to study. It was like esoteric type of secret, though it was not said in that way and it is unfair. I think it is unfair to every human being to give them something to put on their skin in secret and not even know that it is going to affect the liver in the way that it does and then wonder later on, "Why dad is sick with the liver?" I am not saying all of them because not all elevated liver enzymes are a cause for fear, but nevertheless they should definitely be looked into and so that was the reason why he compounded that for us. It was out of a need for our own family and for others. Now, it has just become a real joy and I just -- we love doing what we do.

Carrie Lauth: Yeah. So, tell our listeners more about your blog and your newsletter and what you offer.

Maribel Hernandez: Well, first of all, if anybody calls and then tells us they heard this show, on Natural Moms Radio, we are sending them, to all your listeners, a P&M Dermasalve for them to use when they either contact you or me or E-mail us. Some resources that we provide are the newsletters and this newsletter -- I wanted it to be different, so we created it, so it is a loop. In other words, it will loop back to the one who posted it and people can actually contact others. "Okay, what did that midwife used for the breach condition? How did she position?" We have contributors, a bunch of contributors, who will contribute. So, it will not be just us talking about all of these issues. Everybody can loop back to each other, find the sources they need, find the textbooks they need, find the human anatomy and little toys for children that they need, that is one.

The other resource is the blog where we put in articles. I have put in a few lesson plans because since I am a home school mom, I tend to go that way and I want to go that way were teaching and showing… So, we do a lot of copy work and we have some copy work for students who want to take medicinal plants and learn copy work as we do that and a lot of high school educators do that.

Of course, the P&M Dermasalve is the other resource and the other one, which I did not mention because we have been doing this for years at home, is pro bono. Do you know how lawyers have pro bonos? They will serve you without pay, voluntary services. We do that for families who are having issues with cancer, prostate cancer, liver issues, skin issues, and we will track back their diseases, find out what concomitant symptoms came with this present symptoms and do an analysis and if we have to send them for medical tests or labs, we can give them the names of the medical tests, they can in turn take them to their physician if they want and have them done.

We will also tell them, "Well, you may not want this test because if you have take barium, this could affect your liver," and try to come at it from another approach. What I mean by other approach, I mean taking what has already happened, this disease or this illness or sickness, and trying to backtrack and find out what was the cause instead of just saying "take this." So, that is a pro bono medical research that we do for families and that is done on a personal basis. Some of that is starting to show up in the newsletter where we will talk about those issues.

Carrie Lauth: Well, what do you recommend to a family who may just be starting out, wanting to increase their knowledge about how to handle illnesses at home? What are some resources that you would recommend for them to begin their education?

Maribel Hernandez: I would start out with three -- there were three operatives I was thinking that I had in my mind that would be good for parents to start out; first, for parents to not to become dismayed. It is so easy to become discouraged in this area because there are a lot of resources, yet a lot of them are very superficial. They will say -- it is just like a rehash, Carrie, of what has already been printed out there.

What I would say is for parents to do three things, collect the knowledge they need and when I say knowledge I am talking about books, materia medica type books, herbal books that will give them the information that they want for now, not try to overwhelm themselves and feel "I've gotta have a command of this subject right now," but just start out with baby steps.

A good text -- well, there is many, many, many, but a favorite that I like is Clark. It is a three-volume work by Dr. Henry Clark and it is a complete materia medica and it gives a great overview of quite a few hundred plants, medicinal plants. It gives you their botanical names and their Latin names so that when parents do order, they know what they are ordering.

Parents should never order by their counterpart, their English name, because you can actually get a subspecies of what you really want or an adulterated form. So, that is a good thing. Get the information, the knowledge stage of the plant, locate the books you want and all of these that I am mentioning, these three operatives that I am mentioning, I am going to get into detail in the fall when we issue our first newsletter. So, that is the first operative, get your textbooks if you want to call them that, materia medicas, herbal books, they go by many names.

Medical botany is another, but they should always, these textbooks, should always give the parent what they want. So, I like to look at them first before I buy them because a lot of them as I said are rehashed. After the parent has that knowledge, the parent will want to necessarily move into the understanding.

Knowledge is good, but it is not that good if it is just sitting on the shelf and makes no sense and that is why I say that they have to have the understanding. Understanding what? Understanding the facts that they have just read in their text and then for parents to move into the third stage, which is where a parent synthesizes an outcome, "Okay, I've got this textbook or this materia medica, I look up Hydrastis canadensis, which stops hemorrhaging and now I want to do something with the knowledge that I've learned." So, the parent moves into what we call the last stage, which is called the rhetoric. The first is the grammar stage, the second is the logic and the last is the rhetoric. That is just in a nutshell. That is the classical approach.

Anyway, in that last stage is what a parent does with that knowledge. When the parent reaches that last stage, it is almost as though he or she says to himself, "Wow, I actually learned something that a pediatric doctor knows." Now, that knowledge becomes not only valuable, but it also frees up their checking account.

We saved well over $30,000 in obstetric bills and we talked about that on the newsletter as well, how we did that and break down the figures, but it is amazing how much money and how much heartache a parent can save.

Talking about parents, I just wanted to mention briefly Lucy Meriwether, the famous mother who gave birth to her son, the famous explorer. She was his first teacher at home. She gave birth to Meriwether Lewis and it was he who took care of so many of the explorers when they did get gastrointestinal sicknesses and how she taught him at home and she faced the challenges that we face as parents today. It is quite encouraging to know that there is a long wonderful history of mothers who are actually medical doctors at home, teaching first their children and then helping neighbors.

Maribel Hernandez and Carrie Lauth