The folk remedies have stuck around
By Jeff Raymond
Published: December 3, 2006
Merle Wagner eats nine — not eight, not 10 — gin-soaked raisins every day with glucosamine tablets to prevent arthritis.
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Oklahoma Frontier Drug Store Museum curator Mark Ekiss shows a bottle of Cannabis used as a remedy in the late 1800s at the museum in Guthrie last Wednesday.
BY NATE BILLINGS, THE OKLAHOMAN
Folk remedies
Oklahoma Gardening host and producer Steve Owens shares some common medicinal plants and their uses. However, he emphasizes, medicinal plants can have adverse effects if not taken correctly.
• Purple Coneflower (Echinacea spp.): Used to treat snake bites, toothaches, heal wounds and boost the immune system.
• Bee Balm (Monarda spp.): Used to treat coughs, colds, flu, fevers, insomnia, headaches, sore throats.
• Cattail (Typha spp.): Used to treat coughs, dysentery, digestive disorders, wounds, burns.
• Yarrow (Achillea millefolium): Used to stop bleeding; as a sedative to treat burns; used to treat insect bites and as a painkiller. Contains thujone, which is toxic in large doses.
• Plains Yucca (Yucca glauca): Given to women in prolonged labor, used to reduce dandruff and baldness.
• Elderberry (Sambucus spp.): Used to treat eczema, rashes, colds, flu, fevers. Contains cyanide-producing glycosides.
• Goldenrod (Solidago spp.): Used as a diuretic and to treat kidney stones.
• Passion Flower (Passiflora spp.): Used to treat insomnia and sooth nerves.
• Selfheal (Prunella spp.): Used to treat sore throats and mouth ulcers.
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She swears by the more-common-than-you'd-think cure.
"I don't think you get that much out of the gin, but it might be a combination of the two," said Wagner, 70, of
Edmond.
Others fight a cold with a cup of hot tea fortified with honey and a dash of whiskey, or recover from vomiting with Sprite and crackers.
Folk medicine traditions remain strong in
Oklahoma, due in part to the lingering old and ever-arriving new.
Mexican immigrants may visit a yerberia
, or herb store, or consult a traditional healer, or curandero
, for ailments from weak blood to diabetes. Blacks and American Indians have their own extensive — and sometimes overlapping — herbal remedies and spiritual cures.
Amid double-digit increases in health insurance premiums and expensive blockbuster drugs, traditional remedies would be making a comeback had they ever disappeared.
In the only comprehensive look at alternative therapies, from herbs to aromatherapy, the
National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the
National Institutes of Health, found 36 percent of American adults older than 18 who were surveyed used some form of alternative medicine in 2002. As a child,
Chrissy Rodriguez, 39, got a splinter between the nail and tissue of her big toe. After washing the soon-to-be-infected, swollen digit, her mother wrapped it in bacon fat and gauze, and taped it. The next morning, the splinter was out and the toe was fine.
"All I can tell you is I have personally used it on my son. ... It has worked on everybody I've ever told about it," the
Oklahoma City resident said.
Some remedies didn't work as well — onions didn't seem to treat a bee sting, for one — but Rodriguez's parents had many others in their bag of tricks. "They were kind of in the old school, as it were, for fixing stuff up," she said.
Jason Baird Jackson, an associate professor of folklore at
University of Indiana, emphasized how folk medicine practices differed by location, ethnicity, between individuals and over time, the product of changing knowledge.
"Individuals are making choices all the time, and are learning new things all the time and are coming into exposure of new beliefs and practices all the time," he said.
Jackson has researched Oklahoma Indian folk medicine extensively and most recently worked at the
Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman.
Rodger Harris, oral historian for the
Oklahoma Historical Society, noted the state's "substantial heritage" in American Indian folk remedies. Others are more widespread yet primitive, such as putting a poultice on a bee sting.
"Every culture from everywhere in the world will have some kind of traditional healing practice," he said.
Folk remedies include, in Harris' view, lye soaps, lanolin-based products and herbal medicines on the drug store aisle. They also include sacred practices.
"These things have always been around," he said.
And they continue to make money. In the past, medicine-show minstrels hawked potions; some worked, many didn't. Now, drug companies advertise their purple pills and urge patients to take greater control of their medical care — sort of a throwback to yesteryear.
"What we see today is a coming together of the old folk traditions where actually a company is producing (the medicines) ... and we're being marketed to; we understand that as being wholesome," he said.
Hugh Foley, an associate professor at
Rogers State University in Claremore and president of the
Oklahoma Folklife Council, said American Indian healing practices often were closely held, but other folk remedies were plentiful, and increasingly scientifically sound.
"Now science has proven somewhat that soup (and all its ingredients), combined with the love that offered it, can be the best cure for a cold," he wrote in an e-mail message.
One well-known Oklahoma root is sassafras.
"When the roots are boiled, one can make a tea that is good for a blood thinner, a salve for any skin abrasions and a tasty natural tea drink, which, of course, is what also makes it a primary flavoring for root beer," he wrote.
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