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Sun December 3, 2006

The folk remedies have stuck around

 
 
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By Jeff Raymond
Staff Writer
Merle Wagner eats nine — not eight, not 10 — gin-soaked raisins every day with glucosamine tablets to prevent arthritis.

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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