“I had a friend over and we were playing outside and he got like a cut on his hand or something and just somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered hearing if you take, you know, the back of a knife, like a pocket knife, the not sharp edge and you just kinda gently brush that over top of the cut or if it is a small burn or any sort of small little injury, like that, it will help kind of soothe the pain.”

The informant grew up in North Carolina and lived there his entire life there until moving to Los Angeles around three years ago, where he currently resides. He does not remember exactly where or when he first heard this practice (he is not sure if from the television, the radio, or from someone directly), but recalls thinking of it when he was maybe four or five when his friend and he were playing outside.
As a child, he remembers always having a pocket knife on him, causing him to immediately pull it out when his friend got the cut in order to gently brush the knife over it to try and make him feel better. His friend did not trust him at first, but eventually allowed the informant to try it, ultimately making him “feel a lot better.”
The informant also admits that he is sure he tried it on himself at some point because he was always outside playing with sticks and such as a child.
Since then, the informant remembers looking it up and receiving some sort of conformation that this worked at some point, but has yet to be able to find it years later when looking it up again.

The informant relayed this to me while in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car as she drove us all back up to Los Angeles. I have known the informant since he moved to Los Angeles.

In my opinion, I believe the practice of using the knife to be partially mental as well as physical. My idea follows the idea of “the placebo effect,” where simply being told it will make you feel better, you start to feel better. However, I think the back of a knife, most likely cool and smooth, naturally would feel good on a burn or a cut and would soothe the pain even if only for a little while.

“To prevent this, every night, what you should do is boil water, put flax seeds into it, cumin seeds into it, and there’s a special kind of leafy vegetable, which looks like mint but does not smell like mint. It is called “adulsa.” So, when you put that…it’s pretty pungent…. Like, but you just have to pinch your nose and drink it because it’s for your own good and if you drink that on a regular basis, your metabolism is such that there is good blood circulation happening inside you. You breathe better, you know. You need not do yoga basically, like it helps you cleanse your body well. People even believe that they will lose weight, but I don’t know. I don’t think so, in seeing myself. But definitely you will not catch a cold.”

In India, where the informant is from, there are a lot of variations in climate. It will start off maybe at five degrees Celsius and will increase to potentially forty-two degrees Celsius later in the day. On top of that, it is very humid, so you spend most of the day sweating through your clothes. The informant explains that at that point, no A/C can cool you and that most days you will sweat through your clothes within three hours. So, many Indians try to eat a lot of ice cream or milkshakes to combat the heat. However, they believe that when your head is hot, from the heat and the sunlight, and then you enter a cool place and drink something cold, your body cannot take the difference in temperature and it causes you to catch a cold. While they believe they know why they catch colds, the choose to use this cold prevention trick than trying to go throughout the entire day without attempting to cool off.

The informant assured me that this works and that she often drinks it for months during exam season. However, this is not something that she drinks all the time. Some people will drink it every other night for four years and decide they have built up enough that they will not get sick for awhile after. She does not believe there is a chance to build immunity against this, but she doesn’t think drinking it that much is helpful. For her, it depends on if she can afford to get sick or will have enough time to get well on her own that she drinks it, but she also believes it to be more psychological than physical. That being said, she still swears by it and drinks it as a safety procaution just the same because it has always worked for her.

The informant relayed this to me while we were re-shelving books in the stacks of Doheny Library at USC. She is one of my co-workers.

Personally, I feel like if Indians had the cure to the common cold, the world would have jumped on that awhile ago. Despite that, it sounds to me like the cleanse that has become a craze around Los Angeles. Those, as I am sure this drink as well, help you purge bacteria and such from your body. Unlike the cleanses in America though, you don’t only drink that for three days. Overall though, I think the psychological part plays more of a factor into preventing sickness than the drink itself does.

“She [often a mother] boils butter for like half an hour and when the froth comes on the top, she scrapes it off, freezes it, mixes it with turmeric and a little bit of baking soda. Then, she will place it in a handkerchief till it gets wet and then apply it on the wound and keep it overnight.”

This way of healing a wound is one of the rituals that the informant claims comes from her home state of Mahrasha. She explained that they have a lot of rituals like this, but this one is the most effective. It works on bruises or cuts, even if you are bleeding. It is always applied in the way described if it is to work.

It is said that by doing this, your wound will heal overnight. However, the informant explained that it actually takes closer to a week of using this every night before it works. After a week though, it does completely heal the wound. She emphasized the fact that this will work only when not using other medication whatsoever though.

The informant relayed this to me while we were re-shelving books in the stacks of Doheny Library at USC. She is one of my co-workers.

I found it interesting that the whole treatment really does not speed up the healing process more than I would assume other forms of medication could on their own. However, I think that the butter mixture may help clean the wound better than other forms of medication might be able to, but I am not an expert and do not know for sure. It is interesting though that they would opt to use this home remedy over other forms of medication that you could buy at a drugstore. However, I think the idea of a mother going through the process of making it creates a sort of connection between her and whoever is wounded, making the healing process a communal thing.