Just for laughs, really.
What crazy ideas have you heard for different health ailments? I'm not talking essential oils and stuff that people truly love and believe in, I'm talking about 'out there' cures.
My SIL's MIL (her hubby's mom) is completely crazy. Sweet as can be. My own MIL was poo-pooing my fight with cancer as being not as 'bad' as her sciatica (as she will have to live forever with the sciatica and there is a cure for cancer)---and this other lady is sweetly telling me she's praying for me and hopes I will keep her in the loop--how kind.
Anyhow, she was saying that she is really in great health (age 94, no she is not, but anyway) but she has these random bouts of vertigo which are really bad. I've had these and they are awful. I asked her what she'd done to alleviate them and she said "My doctor has me eating potato chips and drinking a Coke for it". She's dead serious. And she said she knew a lot of other people who got the same advice. (There must be some nutjob doc out there.)
I had the grace not laugh until I was in the car going home. DH was baffled and tried to figure out how this could work.
There's got to be some other amazingly funny 'heals' out there. Let's share.
Mind you, the state I was in by then I don't suppose I'd have cared if it was straight opium!
Not many of us liked the taste of them, but I Loved them, LOL, they were a little beige rectangular and flat wafer, and they would give you an exhilarating whoosh of inspiration when you sucked on them, he only gave them to us sparingly, but I would sneak them out of his drawers.
I know that he also used to find them in specialty candy shops and pharmacies up in BC Canada, before they finally took them off the market in the 80's, of course he stock piled them! Later they were repackaged into what you can now get, VICTORY LOZENGES, but they've taken the Chloroform out of them, you can get them on Amazon, but they are not the same , no more Whoosh!
My parents (for my Mom's Arthritis) used to also smuggle 222's out of Canada. We live in Seattle, so we often shopped up in Canada for the Brittish goods that you cannot find here. The 222's are a Aspirin/tylenol like product that also have Codeine in them. My Mom ate them by the handfuls, terrible, but they helped her with her arthritis pain, so you couldn't really blame her. Later she was treated with the usual narcotics, her arthritis was that bad. God Love her!
God knows if these old remedies contributed to their life ending diseases though, my Dad with PSP, and my Mom With Uterine cancer. Their parents gave them all sorts of "home remedies" when they were young. Of course that was in the 20's before modern medicine and all, I'm sure they tried everything!
CM, calamine lotion helped me as an anti-itch agent, for bug bites and such. And when I’d gotten a bad sunburn that was just beginning to heal, I would feel a maddening deep itch that was too painful to scratch. Calamine lotion was the only thing that quelled that itch. That, and lots of Benadryl.
My husband was given huge doses of cod liver oil as a child but just as a health-maintenance thing.
My parents gave us horrid-tasting vitamin losenzes that I would shove under the sofa as soon as mom wasn’t looking. I didn’t know how to swallow a pill, and I wasn’t about to chew that mess and swallow it. I’m sure my mom found them, but she never said anything. Maybe she tried one.
Barb, I’ve never heard of rubbing a freshly sliced potato on a burn! I will definitely try that the next time I burn myself in the kitchen!
As for potatoes on burns - never tried it, but I do keep aloe plants. Just break off part of a leaf, stalk, whatever you call that growth, and spread the inner liquid on the burn. It works well.
Midkid - I loved paregoric. Mom used it on our gums when teething, but I know it was good for upset stomach or spasms. Only a little did the trick, not like a whole pill of opium!
I've been told that spider webs have a bit of antibiotic effect if put on cut skin. Not the kind with dust on them, like the cobwebs I sometimes have.
Yeah, Bag Balm stinks of menthol. But it’s a great barrier ointment.