Tag Archives: medicine

Soda Cure

Nationality: Chinese American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/11/2013
Primary Language: English

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“So this is something I’ve noticed whenever I have a headache or when I just feel bad, I’ll just go to 7-11 or wherever sells soft drinks and I’ll get a coke and drink a whole bottle of coke. So just a habit. Makes me feel better.”

Soda has been used as a folk remedy of sorts for quite some time now. It seems popular enough that it has been featured on the show South Park in an episode called “Red Man’s Greed” in which people drink chicken soup and Sprite to get over SARS. This is a fitting folk remedy in the United States as we consume more soda per capita than any other country. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that carbonated sugary drinks have become a part of our cultural tapestry.

However, recent research claims Coca-Cola can aid in the dissolution of gastric bezoars. The acidic nature of soft drinks can serve as a first-line treatment for indigestible substances.
Perhaps my informant once had a stomach ache and drank coke, only to realize his symptoms lessened. As a result, he associates coke with a minor remedy for various pains.

See:
Ladas, S.D., Kamberoglou, D., Karamanolis, G., Vlachogiannakos, J., and I. Zouboulis-Vafiadis. (2012) “Systematic review: Coca-Cola can effectively dissolve gastric phytobezoars as a first-line treatment.” Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics 37(2):169-173.

Folk Medicine: Hot Toddy

Nationality: American-black, African-American
Age: 73
Occupation: Retired, former office worker
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 31 2013
Primary Language: English

Ingredients:

Lemon juice

Lemon Rinds

Sugar

Water

  1. Mix all ingredients in a saucepan
  2. Bring the mixture to a boil
  3. Cook slowly until it thickens to a syrupy consistency.

After the mixture is finished the sick person is supposed to drink it.  My informant used this as a remedy for colds and congestion. She used learned from her mother. She used it on herself, her children, and her husband. Her children did not use this on their children, well at least her daughter didn’t. She thought it was gross and thought that Vic Vapor rub was a preferable substitute.  The informant says hasn’t used it in years. She says it is because she is lazy, there other things on the market, and no one has the time to do that anymore.

 

This is an example of a tradition falling out of practice due to it being inconvenient. This bit of folk medicine was passed down through the family but feel out of practice because modern medicine is more widely available. It didn’t fall out of practice because it didn’t work or that modern medicine was better. It fell out of practice because it became impractical.   My informant also grew up in the South and mentioned that folk medicine was popular because doctors were scarce. It came into existence out of necessity then fell out use when it became impractical.

Folk Medicine: Cobwebs

Nationality: African American
Age: 77
Occupation: Retired, formerly a garderner
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 31 2013
Primary Language: English

Note: My informant was originally born in Mississippi.

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My informant told me a story of his mother healing his injuries. He said that when he was 16 or 17 he was shaving off a corn on my foot and cut to deep. Blood was squirting out and I was mashing it trying to stop the bleeding but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. Then his mother comes. He went to his mother for treatment. He says that his mother took a cobweb, took out a match, singed the web slightly, and then placed the cobweb on the wound. The web stopped the bleeding. He thought there some sort chemical in the web that stopped the bleeding

She only used that remedy once on him. He has never used it on himself because not that severe has happened to him again. He doesn’t know where exactly she learned it. He did mention that she grew up on a property in the country part of Mississppi and they didn’t have access to doctors in those days.

I think this story is kind of interesting. A lot of the time folk beliefs are considered superstitious and inaccurate. This brand of folk medicine was born out of necessity an actually works. It’s a shame I can’t talk to the woman herself. I’d really like to know where she learned this from and what sort of trial and error it took to figure this out.

 

Why the Plants are Gods

Nationality: Latino
Age: 19
Occupation: student, officer worker in a shitty office
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/18/2012
Primary Language: English
Language: basic Spanish

From what I can remember, there was a race of living beings, some species before us, way before our time, that knew that we were coming out of the muck and they were much farther evolved than we are or were at the time. I suppose you could say at the time we were either very weird fishy organisms in what we called the muck or something even more devolved than that. And they recognized that something intelligent was going to come out, something that had the capacity to change its environment, grow in strength and power and number. And so that species decided to leave behind some of its intelligence in the form of other living things on the planet, in particular, plants. And those plants ended up helping us in our evolution as we progressed and they spoke to us, so to speak. And they continue to speak to us through different mediums and to the people that choose to listen.

 

My informant learned this myth from a South American shaman who uses plants for medicinal, psychotherapeutic, psycho-spiritual, and healing purposes and ceremonies. It’s a myth about human intelligence and plant intelligence and how we didn’t get to this point on our own, but were given help. What I take from this myth is a particular respect for nature as well as an explanation for the profound powers plants have on their own and the powers they have in our bodies, concerning food, medicine, and even drugs when we find the appropriate ways to extract those powers. Working with plants, humans have developed agriculture and advanced kinds of medicine through practice and study, or as the shaman would say, by listening to what the plants had to tell us and still have to tell us.

 

Home remedy: Arnica

Nationality: Hispanic (product of Spanish rule in the Americas)
Age: 21
Occupation: student, front desk worker/ website translator
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/25/2012
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

My informant told me that a tea can be made from the dried leaves of arnica flowers. If you have a cut, you put that tea on it so it doesn’t get infected. You have to put it on as hot as you can bear it to make sure it will work. My informant learned this from his mother, who learned it from her mother. He said he doesn’t know what’s in it the flowers, but that it works and his mother would make it for him as a child whenever he got a cut.

Arnica flowers have yellow and orange petals and have been used medically for centuries before being incorporated into Western medicine. After doing some research, I was surprised by how many things it was used to treat. Not just external wounds, but also uterine hemorrhage, sprains, cardiac insufficiency. The flowers were native to the mountains of Russia and Europe. My informant was born in Mexico, but he is of Spanish descent, which explains why this treatment has been passed down in his family.

 

More information can be found here: http://www.herbco.com/p-1282-arnica-flower-whole.aspx