ABOUT US
Sam working with a client in a community clinic.
Overview
Starting in early 2012, Herbal Medics already had enough volunteers with excellent skill and teamwork training to be able to plan, prototype and implement projects both locally and internationally.
Our Goals
Herbal Medics is an organization. Our primary goals are:
- To create integrative (plant medicine and orthodox medicine) health models primarily for medically and economically underserved communities, while applying those models to any and all interested communities.
- To preserve, catalog and expand medicinal plant information of herbs around the world – including their habitats, their horticulture and their use.
- To nurture new paradigms of healing – based on clinical, empirical evidence – that allow for a fully integrative model of healthcare.
- To provide this model of medical assistance in remote, post-disaster and underserved urban environments, that models a truly self-sustainable model including epidemiological sources (e.g. contaminated water), self-sustainable nutrition (e.g. community and permaculture-influenced gardens), cultural integration (i.e. education and building long-term cultural relationships) and logistical support (e.g. off-grid engineering).
- To strengthen local community ties by offering mobile monthly clinics for underserved neighborhoods in the San Antonio metropolitan area and working with local cultural and community organizations.
- To implement consistently evolving sustainable gardening and eco-building teaching tools at our San Antonio campus for community use. This will include a 100-hive apiary being maintained on the 50-acre property, eco-building projects that will serve as blueprints for work in austere villages overseas, rainwater catchment systems and community gardens that use permaculture concepts to address limited resources and drought conditions.
Here are some highlights since that time:
The Human Path and a local area charitable organization sent a team of herbal-medicine and primitive engineering students to two remote towns in the hills east of the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua: La Uva and La Novia.
The goal was to introduce herbal medicine and sustainable health care solutions (starting with clean drinking water) to an area that did not have regular access to any medical care and whose only source of water was contaminated water from the village well.
This team mission included the construction of a central slow-sand filtration system built from local materials by both the engineering students and the villagers, education for the children on basic hygiene and sanitation, an introduction to the local medicinal plants of the region and an herbal clinic that provided very successful treatment (as validated in a follow-up visit) for roughly 100 people per day from the region.
Herbal Medics also started a monthly herbal clinic in 2012 to provide free education and access to the use of local, regional and other medicinal herbs for better health.
Our primitive engineers and advance-party core team returned to the other side of Nicaragua (San Juan de Nicaragua) in 2013 and built a large, slow-sand water filtration system from local materials for the town clinic. This is now the only source of clean drinking water for the town.
Herbal Medics purchased an outboard motor for the only local healer for the local indigenous Indian tribe (Rama Indians) in order to help facilitate his ability to obtain medicinal plants from upriver. He has provided superlative health care for the local people for over 50 years in this region, but due to his age, it has become difficult for him to continue his work without some type of help in traveling up and down river for miles.
Additionally Herbal Medics sent a botanical-medicine specialist to live and work with this healer for a short time, in order to begin the work of documenting local medicinal plants and their usage.
In 2013, Herbal Medics also purchased a full-size school bus and has begun the design phase of converting the bus into a mobile herbal clinic and teaching lab. Aside from providing free plant medicine in medically undeserved areas in South Texas, the bus will be used to demonstrate and organize community gardening and food/medicine gardening techniques that include raised bed, wicking bed, aquaponics, vermiculture composting and more.