The Borderlands
USA/Mexico
The Healers
A Trained Medical Doctor also using herbs--San Juan Mendoza, M.D
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Dr. San Juana Mendoza
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Dr. Mendoza says, “My formal training was as a general practitioner. I have knowledge on medicine, but sometimes those medicines are too expensive for my patients. Simple cough syrup will cost 10 - 15 dollars. A mom can prepare her own cough syrup in her own kitchen just by combining bee honey, lemon juice, and some herbs we have available here in the area like eucalyptus, oregano, and a little bit of garlic. This makes an excellent cough syrup.”
“As doctors we understand that liquids are one of the best thing for sick people. But if I just tell a mother to give her child more fluids, maybe she will not understand or think it is important. But if I tell her to make this herb infusion and give her child a cup every 3 hours, it works in two ways – the herbs help and the water is very good.”
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Along the border
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The population Dr. Mendoza serves along the border migrated north, mostly from the interior of Mexico in search of jobs. These people have very limited education and earn only about 35 to 45 dollars a week in the factories (maquilas) along the border.
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Some of Dr. Mendoza's patients
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Dr. Mendoza reports that once they have a steady income, their lifestyle changes for the bad . They tend to buy corn chips, junk food and get addicted to sugar based sodas. They ride the bus to work and at maquilas works sitting down or doing repetitive operations. So on they start developing diseases that were not common in their villages like hypertension, diabetes, arthritis, even depression.
Dr. Mendoza reports many of her patients simply cannot afford the drugs. “I recommend them to use natural things that are available, like a healthy diet, a healthy plan of exercises, and also to use wild herbs that are available in our community. After all, many medicines are based on herbal principles, many herbs have given us the active principles in the synthetic medicines.”
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Inside Dr. Mendoza's clinic
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She continues, “I see lots of patients, lots of families that come from the country, and they tend to disconnect with their cultural roots. They tend to forget their ancestor’s knowledge. Every tribe used to have their own medicine and their own spices and their own food. One of my duties is to remind them about this link between them and their environment, to help them to recognize all these sources that we have, to recognize the plants and to accept and to come back to the use of herbs that are practical, and helps them save money and give more independence.”
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Dr. Mendoza and a patient at her clinic
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Dr. Mendoza says, “My main concern is to teach the people how to stay healthy, to stay in the right path and to prevent complications that will take them to hospitals, to traumatic treatments. If eventually a woman comes to me and tells me that she now knows how to take care of her family, and I don’t have to come to you anymore, I feel happy.”
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The pharmacy
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“I got into medicine because I knew first hand the needs. I come from a mining family, my father my grandfather my uncles they were miners they worked in the ‘Sierra Madre’ of Chihuahua, and I was aware some how about the hardness of living in isolated places and living with no medical sources available. It was for me a very deep memory to see my mom not sleeping the whole night because she had a sick baby and she didn’t have sources some times to go to the doctor and for me that was a very pain full very pitiful memory to see a mother suffering because the child is sick.”
A Traditional Village Healer:
Amada Aguilares Martinez is a curandera or local healer in a small village in Oaxaca. She explains how she learned about medicinal plants “My mom showed me because we children would get sick, and she would look for herbs. She would bathe us or give us something to drink. I memorized the herbs she used so I could use them, too. I work with herbs but I also work with God, because God left us these plants on the land to cure his children.”
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Amada Aguilares Martinez
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Picking the right herb
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Medicinal herbs
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The people who come to Amada pay her whatever they think it’s worth, although she says another curandero nearby does have set rates for his cures. With modern doctors far away, herbal healers are the primary source of medical care for many Oaxacanos, who are mostly subsistence farmers. Amada is sad, however, that none of her children wanted to learn from her. They have all moved away from the village. She worries her knowledge of desert plants will die with her.
Healers in the students’ families:
Dr. O’Connell says, “Many times students will come to my office to be interviewed for working in research labs. And when I describe the project to them the medicinal plant project they’ll say ‘Oh yeah, my grandmother made me a tea whenever I had a stomach ache or I had this when I had a head ache or’ all these times in their childhood and even into their adulthood they were given preparations made from regional plants to make them feel better. It was quality of life medication these were not you know trauma events usually, but they were a natural appropriate treatment that the families automatically gravitated to and used.”