Why don’t you sell regular vitamins like A, C, and E?

At Mom’s Cupboard our focus is unique formulations and documented efficacy. The products we sell are generally one-of-a-kind formulas that cannot be found at every neighborhood health food store. Vitamins like A, C, and E usually vary little from one brand to another and our clients and customers can get a better price at a large health food store that stocks large quantities than we can offer. While Mom may recommend a specific brand to a client in an individual consultation, we want to do everything we can to save you money and will direct you to your local health food store for “staple” vitamins.

What is Mom’s Cupboard?

In 1994, Terry Suttles (Mom) discovered the world of natural medicine because her daughter Amanda was wasting away with an unknown chronic illness that baffled all her doctors. As friends saw Amanda re-gaining her health they began coming to Mom for help with their own problems and their families. And Mom’s Cupboard was born.

How can I schedule an individual consultation with Mom?

If you live in Annapolis or plan to be in the Washington DC metro area send us an email with your contact information and we will call to set up an appointment.

HISTORY

The story of Mom’s Cupboard begins long before the business of Mom’s Cupboard was ever conceived. It is a family story more than anything, and it begins with the birth of a baby girl in 1979 to Harv and Terry Suttles, a.k.a. Mom. With two sons already, Amanda was the daughter that they had waited for. Her first bout of asthma was just a week before her 1st birthday. Amanda spent the next 14 years being shuffled between doctors’ offices and her darkened bedroom where she was never far from her nebulizer.

As a former medical professional, Mom was convinced that the answers to her illness would be found in traditional medicine. But when Amanda began high school, in 1994, traditional medicine ran out of ideas. After four months of infections, four different doctors, and over a dozen different antibiotics and other drugs, her doctor’s final suggestion was experimental IgG injections at Duke University. They couldn’t understand why her immune system wouldn’t respond properly. The infection had taken its toll on Amanda’s body – she had lost 20 pounds, an unexplainable rash covered nearly her entire body, she suffered from a constant migraine headache and had severe fatigue that made it impossible for her to attend school.

A close family friend had sent Mom some information on natural supplements that she thought might help her, but Mom’s confidence in traditional medicine led her to disregard it as too far outside the medical profession. When Amanda’s doctors ran out of ideas though, she turned again to the natural supplements looking for new hope. There had to be a better way, so Mom ordered the products and Amanda made the first great strides toward recovery shortly after starting the natural products.

The fact that natural substances could have such a dramatic effect on her daughter drove Mom to learn more. She began researching everything she could think of to find out what else may be able to help Amanda. Soon she learned about the internet, and though surmounting the learning curve of the World Wide Web was a daunting task, she dove into it head first. Once she found the international database for medical research, she devoured every page. Years in the medical profession and decades in doctors’ offices gave her a base of medical knowledge upon which to build a thorough understanding of Amanda’s health.

Over the next two years, Mom learned as much as she could and called every formulator and researcher she thought might be able to help her find the products to give Amanda a complete recovery. Mom’s Cupboard, though not yet official, began as friends began asking about products that had helped Amanda, many of which could not be bought in a common health food store. So Mom began ordering products for her friends that needed help, and, eventually, the network expanded so much that she was shipping products to friends of friends on the other side of the country.

At this point, Amanda was doing so much better that she was able to go off to college. She had been home schooled for all but three months of high school and was anxious to regain a social life. So she did what most average college students do; though she still adhered to her strict diet, she never slept right, ate infrequently, and basically ran her already fragile body into the ground without even realizing it until it was too late. After two years away at college, with dangerously low blood pressure, unexplainable low blood sugar, severe fatigue, insomnia, and mood swings, Amanda crashed again. She quit school and moved home where she began the search for a doctor that could give her a diagnosis.

Five different doctors all over the East Coast diagnosed everything from “unknown adrenal problem” to the normal depression of a 19 year old female. But they finally got a diagnosis, complicated though it was – Addison’s disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, hypothyroidism, and Fibromyalgia. This opened up a new frontier of researching for Mom. In the quest to restore her daughter’s health, even more people came to her for help. So Mom’s Cupboard, LLC became official, with a website and the whole nine yards. Today Mom shares research with people around the world and ships product nationwide.

Amanda now takes a combination of drugs and nutritional supplements to maintain her relatively high level of function. She’s not yet 100%, but the quest continues. To read more about her progress and her individual struggle with chronic disease, check out Mom’s Cupboard’s monthly newsletter “From the Cupboard”.