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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.

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I'm going to assume that this lady's sodium runs a little low and that she gets "lightheaded".
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I have been told by my endocrinologist that if my sodium and/or blood sugar are low and I feel dizzy to have a small glass of soda (not diet) and to eat a couple of pretzels. I’ve done it a couple of times when I didn’t have a glucose tablet and it worked very quickly. I keep a couple of cans of regular soda and a bag of pretzels in the freezer.
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You have to roll your eyes at almost everything that comes out of Hollywood, particularly prolific with the weird "health" tips are the Kardashians and Gwyneth Paltrow. The fact that people actually follow this stuff is bizarre to me.
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I remember one summer as a teen, I started feeling lightheaded at work. I panicked and called my pediatrician who told me to get a bag of chips from the vending machine. It worked!
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My dad has end stage heart failure, we’ve thought he was at the end several times in the last year and each time he’s survived. An amazing number of the really bad days he’s combatted feeling quite miserable with his own fix of diet Mountain Dew and Cheetos. Go figure!
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Lol, it is funny Midkid.
I am going to guess that the science behind it is that one's electrolytes get low, and sugar too if we don't eat right or miss a meal.
This can be an urgent matter in many cases, such as diabetes. Or, if one is on medications that can alter electrolytes, glucose, thyroid hormones, etc.

The salt in chips, the glucose in soda, the liquid for dehydration, even the carbonation may fit in there somewhere.

I do think that foods can heal, but that would not be to the exclusion of other fixes.
I have had to drink a little coffee on rare occasions to help me sleep.....ha ha ha,
go figure. Do not have a clue for the science behind that.

This is not to discount one bit your statement as true: "There must be some nutjob doc out there". Lol.
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Garlic up the bottom.

😳

I haven't personally tried it, but I have heard it recommended and sworn by as a sure and certain way to stop a cold in its tracks. One clove, and shove it, so to speak.

I'll try it if you will...
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Coke syrup is really good for an upset stomach.
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I've heard of putting a clove of garlic in your socks CM (crushed of course), I think I'd try that method before trying yours!
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Okay, I have to know. Did anyone’s grandma tell them that they couldn’t go swimming or wash their hair while they were on their cycle? Mine did! She told me that when I was a teenager.

My friend invited me to go to go swimming and grandma told me not to go because I was on my cycle. I asked my mom an she said it was an ‘old wives tale.’

Mom told me not to ever mention using a tampon to grandma or she would freak out!

Barb,

My parent’s time cola syrup was supposed to be really good for an upset stomach. When I took my daughter to the pediatrician they changed it saying no to anything with sugar, no coke, 7up, etc. My MIL said they were wrong and coke was good! Hahaha
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My ex-SIL called me up one day when she was pregnant, and wanted to know if it was safe for her to take a bath with Vick’s vapo rub dissolved in to the water. She had the flu or something, she was sick.....I thought she was crazy but my husband said Vick’s baths are a Hispanic thing lol. Guess his mom gave them Vick’s baths when they were sick.

on the flip side, she thought I was crazy when I gave her a container of corn starch to have on hand Incase the baby got a diaper rash and the traditional creams didn’t work or she didn’t have any rash cream.
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I remember way back whenever my Mom burned her hand while cooking, she would put butter on the burn spot. Now I heard that is the worse thing to do.

For myself, I just run cold water over the spot.
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I remember them putting butter on a burn. That is bad. Cold water is best.

What was that red stuff they put on our cuts and scrapes? Can’t think of the name of it at the moment.
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Iodine?
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Mercurachrome
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One of my sisters told a story from her hospital nursing days, about a doctor who had prescribed 2 cc’s of Milk of Magnesia to a constipated patient. (Two cc’s is like .07 fluid ounces.) The patient looked skeptically at the tiny plastic cup and said “I don’t think this is going to do anything!”
I don’t know how the nurses fixed it but my sister said that the doctor never admitted to his mistake.
The only wacky prescription I can remember at the moment are gin-soaked raisins for arthritis pain.
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NHWM, I remember my father putting butter on my forehead when my aunt accidentally spilled a kettle of hot tea on it ( I was a kid and underfoot). I remember sitting upstairs with a shiny forehead and a keen sense of wounded dignity when the party still went on among my grownup relatives downstairs.
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I used to get ear infections all the time as a kid, and had to go to the Dr to get my eardrum pierced to let the fluid out ( its a wonder I can hear!) I hated that, and told my grandmother when my ear hurt. She would warm up some "sweet oil" and put a drop in my ear. I have no idea what " sweet oil" was, but it sure worked!! And my GGM used to try to get us kids to "eat" Vicks Vapor rub.. she even tried to hide it in our juice!
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One winter Dad swore he'd keep us cold-free and healthy with cod-liver fish oil.  a teaspoon each, straight from the bottle....horrid tasting!  We tried all sorts of stuff to get rid of the taste, but the only thing that worked was Graham Crackers.  I don't remember if we were healthy that year or not.  He never tried it again, and to this day I swear I taste cod-liver oil if I try a Graham Cracker!
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Grannie,

Mom takes it in capsule form! Cod liver oil in a capsule. Yep, a doctor prescribed it years ago for her.
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Kat,

That’s it! It was red and I think it stained clothes if it got on them.
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Dizzy,

My word! A hot pot of tea, OUCH! Butter on your forehead. My gosh, how long before it healed?
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These things go in and out of style too. Same with these crazy studies, something goes out, then they go back to it later. Kind of like fashion! Hahaha. One day, as s teen I came home with new shoes that I bought and was all excited to show my mom. They were platform shoes. She looked at me and said, “That’s not a new style, we had those too.” Was new for me though. She said the same thing about peasant blouses. I saw the same thing with my girls. They giggled when I told them that I wore some of the same styles they did.

Okay, my girls called them low rise jeans. We called them peanut jeans. Why peanut? Hell if I know why. And the platform shoes that our kids wear are crazy looking! LOL

My daughter and I had an argument about shoes that she would wear for her confirmation. I told her, we have a big church and many kids will be confirmed. Your feet will be killing you at the end of the night. She said, no they won’t, mom. So I let her find out for herself. At the reception afterwards in the church hall all of the girls had kicked off their shoes.
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GrannieAnnie, ah yes, cod-liver oil straight from the bottle. Apparently it worked as I had perfect attendance in school from K-12. But no one wanted to sit near me [just kidding].
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I had a younger friend that asked if she could use vitamin D instead of birth control because she wanted to have relations with her boyfriend at the time. Me and her friends told her to go and get BC instead.
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Oh gosh, Anonymous

You just reminded me of something awful. There was a girl at my high school that was a bit ‘off.’ Everyone knew it.

Kids are cruel. Someone told her that a girl got pregnant because a guy stuck his finger in her navel and she had to place a band-aid over her navel to protect herself. She did it!

I sat next to her in English class. She whispered in my ear that she was protected. I had no idea what she was talking about so I asked her to explain what she meant.

She told me that she was wearing a bandage over her navel and when I asked her why she told me which girls had told her that she could get pregnant if a boy stuck his finger in her navel.

I told her they lied and to take the bandage off and to speak to her mom about it after school and ask her to explain how a girl becomes pregnant.
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Well, goodness, the chips and coke is actually a thing! We kind of wondered about the high salt content being one of the 'issues' but my friends who have chronic vertigo are all on low salt diets, so that made no sense.

My grandma used to put a big glob of Vicks on the back of dad's mouth and made him let it run down his throat to cure colds. I KNOW he got cod liver oil daily.

My MIL was insistent I swab my kids' throats with Mercurochrome!! It has MERCURY in it. Love of heaven--she did this to her own kids. I told my DH I know why he's crazy, he was ingesting heavy metals all his life. I wouldn't let her near the kids when they were sick.

I DO remember getting a mustard plaster (vaguely) administered to me by my grandmothers, I guess I had croup or something and I know it 'helped' but it was far more likely the daily shots of penicillin that cured me.

Thank you but I am pretty cautious about what I insert anywhere--so the garlic clove up the tush is not happening.

For the severe nausea during pregnancy I did take a Tablespoon of coke 'syrup', and it really helped, but so did sipping on an ice cold coke in a glass.
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I'm actually quite relieved to hear that, Midkid.

I certainly DON'T want to hear that anyone's taken up the challenge.

On old time cures - has ANYBODY ever found calamine lotion good for anything? It's still around, and as far as I've noticed equally useless for chicken pox, sunburn, eczema or anything else it's recommended for.
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I am not a soft drink person. I love coffee, no sugar in it. Yuck! Hate sweet coffee. That’s my vice. But there is something nice about coke if you are sick. It is soothing.

CM,

I remember calamine lotion being used on my chicken pox as a kid and I guess other skin issues. I do remember a bottle being in the medicine cabinet.
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Ah--and Paregoric! we always had a huge bottle of that. Mom gave us a spoonful for all things tummy-related (and for nights when they had dinner guests).


When I found out I was taking OPIUM--well, it was super effective and that's one drug I wish you still could get. DH has horrible stomach cramps at times and Paregoric was the only thing that helped. Maybe I was just drugging him into submission :)
I have a crusty, VERY OLD bottle of calamine lotion and I know our last need for it was 30 years ago with chicken pox. I don't recall that it helped at all. I probably should toss it :)
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