Home remedies are supposedly a domain unique to ancient women who shuffle around in slippers and wear fuzzy berets to church every Sunday. When a friend tells you to drink tea with lemon and honey that one morning it felt like you were getting sick, in lieu of science’s luxuries of penicillin and Robitussin, we even call these “old wive’s tales”.
Not quite sure I want to know what this scientific luxury does…
Notwithstanding the pejorative air of dismissal we exude when we use that phrase, these beliefs and remedies are alive and well. As a child, it was gospel that, should I play with matches, I would definitely pee my pants. A childhood friend’s grandmother was horrified to find her sitting on concrete, fearing that the cold of the building material would chill her ovaries, rendering her infertile and the grandmother great-grandchildless.
But no self-respecting citizen of the First World believes that crap, right? There’s always that understanding that these beliefs are the relics of a bygone era, centuries before the Enlightenment, before humans understood that illnesses just don’t happen but have a specific cause beyond your failure to cross yourself and spit three times superstitiously at the crossroads you passed earlier that week. Most of you would think back in your own pasts, and return a resounding “Wrong again!”.
Face it, you’ve used loads of home remedies, and not just once. Why is actually the better question. Humans are hopeful creatures. Until our dying breath we understand that our bodies are too complex for even doctors to understand. After all if doctors knew the secret to not dying, they would obviously use it on themselves. Last time I checked, doctors are still mere mortals. Thus we hope to an extreme level, hoping that something we eat, some sort of ritual, et cetera will inexplicably heal us or help us in a time of need. All in vain.
This is, in fact, the very root of organized religion. Just we gave that unseen force a name and allowed it to command us to kill people that didn’t believe in Him/Her/It/Them.
Our hope persists even when death is staring us right in the face. At the top of the list of home remedies is pure, dumb luck. Yes, we believe that, if we apply a generous mixture of luck and chance to our bodies, three times daily as ordered by the doctor, we will be saved from imminent calamity because sometimes it works. Just like every home remedy.
Watch any clip of stock footage from some poor people during wartime being paraded to their deaths. In many instances, they knew exactly what was in store, and in many instances, you can see that they greatly outnumber their oppressors. Suddenly, you are struck with the question: why don’t they just overwhelm their captors? Why, you ask? Because every individual human during that awful war was using that home remedy, that basic instinctual understanding that, if they just complied, maybe the medication would work, and they would be spared by pure, dumb luck.
Ahhh the jungle.
Where I currently was (Thailand) dumb luck was all you had. Between soups of intestines and snake whiskey, the only way to avoid self-induced dysentery was luck and simply eating less food so that the deadly bullet of spicy diarrhea that was to be your doom in this deadly game of culinary Russian roulette would be less likely to be the next bite.
If that wasn’t enough, the sun was just stronger in this part of the world. Stepping out into the sun was like being Jonah in the book “The Giver”, the first time the old man transmits the memory for “sunburn”. It’s a poignant thought, the realization that the delicious smell of grilled meat is really the aroma of your own searing flesh.
I was smart; I stayed in the shade and generously applied sunblock. Others were not so lucky: many European sun-lovers made the mistake of thinking they were somehow inoculated by their previous experiences in Greece or Southern Spain. This was where cultural exchange meant that I would learn how others around the world traditionally remedy the ailments that afflict them.
One morning, I walk into my room in my hostel to what appeared to be a freshman pledge hazed in the locker room by the football team. On much of his body, this man was covered in what looked like shaving cream, with his girlfriend liberally applying more. I couldn’t help but laugh at the snowman, except that, what covered him repulsed me before I could with its acrid smell.
I asked my Swiss roommates what that god-awful stench was, assuming that they had acquired a taste for bushmeat and that monkey jerky was drying on the window sill in the sun. The answer was the covering substance, a German dairy product named “quark” akin to cream cheese, which somehow they had managed to obtain among a generally lactose-intolerant people. I’m sure it was in the Thai corner market, right next to the fish sauce.
For my friend with the sizzled epidermis, his remedy was smearing sour cheese all over himself, presumably to let it curdle in this god awful heat. That night, I wish I had cotton jammed deep in my nose….or give up on dumb luck, take matters into my own hands, and smother myself with my pillow.
Lesson learned: People cure themselves in strange ways. Chalk most up to cultural differences, but don’t be surprised if one of them rubs you the wrong way.
–Russell (29), Melbourne, Australia, doing rails of cottage cheese in Thailand