Suffer cramp in the legs a lot. Last year my partners aged dad mentioned similar and that a lady had once told him to put a bar of soap under his pillow each night, to his amazement it worked and reduced his cramps to next to nothing. Sceptically I tried similar and yes it worked and is working for me, has cut my cramps down considerably and just get the odd twitch now and then, about the only twitch I seem to get these days :)
So lets hear your tales and experiences
My life as a doctor is full of this stuff.
My mother in law even suggested, in my presence, for one of my children to put butter on a burn.
One of my patients was importing Emu oil from Australia to rub into her painful knee.
MiL also has a conker in the corner of every room in her house to ward off spiders
... And warned me that 5G is dangerous and the Japanese have banned it
Last edited by The Doc; 5th June 2020 at 10:24.
This one is not an old wives tale, more a tale of lack of intelligence.
A guy that used to help my father out around the house firmly believed that miners drank a pint of milk after their shift to wash the dust out of their lungs. I tried to explain to him that the milk would go into their stomach not their lungs and that a pint of milk in their lungs would kill them.
He wouldn’t have none of it.
Is it true that wearing a watch on a Nato attracts socially inept middle-aged introverts?
Asking for a friend.
We have conkers on the window ledges and definitely see less(almost nil) spiders in the house, they were free so no loss there for minimal effort.
If you eat your crusts your hair will go curly (or was it the other way around?).
When you pulled a 'funny face' as a kid - 'if the wind changes you will stay like that'
WTF is that all about?!
Don't mix ham and banana.
My Great Uncle George(?) did that and it killed him.
I remember them too growing up along with eating carrots so you could see in the dark.
I also recall looking to buy my first house around the early 90’s and looking at a place that belonged to an old lady - all the window cills had a clove of garlic on to ward off vampires. The estate agent who was himself was retirement age said that over the years he’d seen that a few times. Mainly from old ladies living alone.
Don’t pick your nose your head will cave in. 😄
Don't sleep in the subway, darling.
Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.
Sent through the ether by diddling with radio waves
Don't play with yourself, you will go blind, hang on wheres my glasses :)
When I was an amateur boxer and fighting with the scales to make weight I was encouraged to eat Grapefruit before I went to bed as the Grapefruit would burn excess weight off while I slept.
What a load of crap !!!
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When my grandad had a bad chest, grand mother said we should rub goose fat on his back. He went downhill fast after that.
My grandmother often said "it's too cold to snow" (North Nottinghamshire). Not true, having endured three Northern Albertan winters where it would be -35 and bucketing down...
This was based on a bit of British Propaganda from WW2
In an effort to hide the fact the RAF had airborne radar and to explain John ‘Cats Eyes’ Cunningham’s high kill ratio the government claimed that he had great night vision helped in part by eating carrots.
It also helped get the the public (children) to eat more carrots improving nutrition under rationing.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-...dark-28812484/
Put a clean cobweb on a cut helps stop the bleeding and healing so they say and one via my FIL which came down from his mother, brushing your hair daily in the early years will prevent it thinning later in life, didn't work for him though.
I tested this with my son who heard it at school. We put a conker in the corner of his wardrobe and went back to it a few weeks later to find it covered with cobwebs. There were none anywhere else in the wardrobe Sent from my POT-LX1 using TZ-UK mobile app
There's some background logic to that iirc - the cat will lick its paws clean outside the door and think the world is like that so will come back to the "clean" house being the spick and span creatures they are. Something along those lines, definitely been discussed here before!
I'll add the throwing salt over your shoulder after spilling some otherwise bad luck concept; talk about self-defeating!
It's not exactly a myth, there is a connection between carotene and sight. Maybe the mechanism wasn't known at the time but it is now. Carrots have high carotene which the body makes into Vitamin A. Vitamin A is converted to 11-cis-Retinal which is a visual pigment in the eyes. When visible light "hits" this pigment it is converted to all-trans-Retinal which is used in a neuronal signal to the brain (sight).
I worked for six months on a hospital burns unit. We admitted from 15%, up to about 70% burns on people. Lots of them died. The severely burned patient is a terrible thing. We used zero butter.
On a lighter note, in the burns unit kitchen there was an old recipe book which I leafed through one evening. I found a diet from the 1970s called the 20 Egg Burns Diet.
In an attempt to get protein into these unfortunate souls, it called for 20 eggs to be eaten, a day. And a large quantity of whole milk and butter.
Oh and I'm also a licenced arachnid disposer, and I can say that they have no fear of conkers.
One of these stories is true.
You can not fail to "pull" on a night out if you wear a kilt .
I can confirm this works 100% of the time. It also seems to work regardless of the normal attractiveness of the kilt wearer.
"There's great healing in a dog's tongue".
Friends of my parents used to get their dog to lick any cuts or scrapes that their children acquired.
That look they have when they take a peek fully expecting there to be a pair of calvin’s under there and instead finding an unleashed one eyed beastie staring back at them.
Its a mixture of fear , surprise and keen predatory interest.
Don’t wear pants , it spoils the fun. Like arm bands in the grown ups pool.
When I was a young child, my granddad once said 'Eatin' strong cheese late at night will make yer costive'.
No it doesn't! These days nothing does. Not Viagra or mucky magazines. And certainly not eating bloody strong cheese!
All I got from that was constipation. Perhaps I heard him wrong?
Last edited by grey; 13th June 2020 at 17:18.
i think i can add to this, i remember a war story my grandfather told me when i was a kid.
they were out on patrol for days and were down to nothing but the last drops of water in their canteens and half a biscuit brown each, it was getting pretty desperate and granddad recalled how he'd rather go out fighting than starving. it looked hopeless until their sergeant spotted a life line, a banana tree just off in the distance, they moved toward it but at around 30yrds out all hell broke loose, lead was flying in all directions, boys were being cut down, the sergeant called out for them to get down and my granddad took cover behind a low wall. with his body forced as far into the ground as he could he called out to the sergeant "what the hell's going on?"
the sergeant then broke the dreaded news "its not a banana tree, its a ham bush!"
im so sorry, i couldn't resist. i'll ban myself.
And discussed in Most Secret War by R V Jones. A great book.
If you see a doctor and complain of leg cramps at night you may well be prescribed quinine.
I was and it worked very well.
I asked a doctor friend how this works he said 'We have no idea'
Old wives tales often have an element of truth about them, after all most scientific exploration and research starts with observing cause and effect then finding out why
Since so many expressions in English came from France originally, which itself comes from Latin, it could be the origin of the expression.
In French, they are called "remèdes de bonne femme". In popular French, bonne femme is the equivalent of "women" in a condescending way (good old dears would carry the spirit) but in this case it's quite different as it comes from the Latin bona fama, of good reputation.
So they are basically empirical remedies that were thought to work. In some cases they are indeed very good. For example, the meadowsweet was used against headaches. Modern analysis has shown it contained a substance close to the active molecule in aspirin. In others they are just superstition.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
My late gran was a great one
I had warts on my hands as a teenager - was very conscious
One day she got a cube of stewing steak and rubbed it raw all over them
She then buried the meat in the ground
Imagine my disbelief when a few weeks later they had ALL gone - all at once in one hit
100% true story
I went to Junior School having had a glass of rum and olive oil with my breakfast,what was that about ?