Health Conferees Hear of Latino Folk Medicine

When Abel Martinez was a boy, he remembers, his mother cured his ankle sprain with a home remedy made from fresh tomatoes.

“She boiled the tomatoes and put a warm washcloth over my ankle. . . . As she put the tomato mix over my ankle, it was like magic. You could see the swelling going down,” said Martinez, a Los Angeles County health education coordinator who spoke Tuesday at a conference for doctors and nurses on Latino male health issues.

In the Mexican culture, Martinez explained, it is the family members, sometimes “the abuelitas (grandmothers) and abuelitos (grandfathers),” who perpetuate this knowledge of folk healing or curanderismo, from generation to generation.

“Not all Latinos believe in curanderismo, “ Martinez said. “But for Mexicanos , the mother country is right next door.”

And as Southern California’s population shifts with increasing numbers of immigrants, it becomes important to know where they seek medical help, he said.

“Do they go to the doctor first? To the curandero? You have to remember that these folk healers wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a demand,” he said.

The implication, Martinez said, is that these folk cures, many of which are simple herbal teas but some of which involve complex and dangerous concoctions, are handed down from trusted family members. “The strength is the fe, “ or faith, he said.

The conference grew out of an idea to form a coalition to look at health issues involving Latino males, who are “underserved and underrepresented” because many are poor, said organizer Barbara Holmes, director of the Office of Multicultural and Minority Health for the county’s Health Care Agency. The new coalition consists of leaders in Orange County’s ethnic communities, along with health care workers.

How far are folk cures entrenched in Latino culture?

“I’m sure that everybody at one time has prayed to their own saint. My mother was a believer of (herbal) teas,” said Enrique Zuniga, a counselor for disadvantaged students at Fullerton College.

Zuniga’s brother was once scheduled for surgery because of a gastrointestinal problem. But when his mother found out, she prepared an empacho (intestinal illness) remedy by burning a stem of a maguey cactus, and blending the ashes with water and other herbs.

It was a foul-tasting liquid, “but when he went to the hospital he told the doctors he wasn’t in pain. They did an X-ray and the mass was now gone.”

In fact, cactus, commonly referred to as nopal in Spanish, has medicinal byproducts, Martinez said, including aloe vera, and is believed to help combat diabetes because of its high water content.

Said Norma A. Bleecker-Trujillo, a law clerk for a Santa Ana law firm who recently finished law school and is awaiting the bar examination: “My family has a history of diabetes. We’ve always had nopalitos mixed in with our food in some form or another. Sometimes we dice the nopal and mix with chili, and add cilantro and onions for a healthy salad. Or nopales with eggs.

“With many of our injury-compensation cases, our Latino clients, especially the men, get compensation but instead of finding a doctor here, they then go to Tijuana looking for someone who cures people.”