home remedies you would NEVER try - Page 9

When our son got what I thought was conjunctivitis as a small baby, my husband told me to squirt a few drops of breastmilk into his eye a few times a day to clear it up. It was a funny sight, me trying to aim my boob at the eye of an infant who didn't really appreciate having his eye held open. (Son didn't have conjunctivitis, he had a clogged tear duct, so the breastmilk thing didn't work. But I've since heard other people swear by this as well.)

We do keep a head of cabbage in our unit fridge at the hospital for our moms with engorged breasts -it works beautifully.

I used to work at a community health center and we saw many kids with thrush, oral HSV, or strep come in with purple mouths. Moms had painted them with gentian violet. I did some looking/reading and found that gentian violet has antibiotic properties and is fairly common in Latin America....then the lightbulb clicked on that that's one of the ingredients in triple dye, which is what they use to paint babies' umbilical cords in some hospitals.

My great aunt FIRMLY believes that if you have a child with asthma, you should buy a Chihuahua dog and allow it to sleep with that child. She swears that the dog will then take the asthma from the child. As she told me "...but then you have a dog with asthma, but you find little chihuahua dogs anywhere..."

When our son got what I thought was conjunctivitis as a small baby, my husband told me to squirt a few drops of breastmilk into his eye a few times a day to clear it up. It was a funny sight, me trying to aim my boob at the eye of an infant who didn't really appreciate having his eye held open. (Son didn't have conjunctivitis, he had a clogged tear duct, so the breastmilk thing didn't work. But I've since heard other people swear by this as well.)

We do keep a head of cabbage in our unit fridge at the hospital for our moms with engorged breasts -it works beautifully.

I used to work at a community health center and we saw many kids with thrush, oral HSV, or strep come in with purple mouths. Moms had painted them with gentian violet. I did some looking/reading and found that gentian violet has antibiotic properties and is fairly common in Latin America....then the lightbulb clicked on that that's one of the ingredients in triple dye, which is what they use to paint babies' umbilical cords in some hospitals.

My grandmother insists that drinking beer will increase a mother's milk production. My sister actually took her up on the advice! I don't drink and I didn't think that "increased milk production" was a good enough reason start.

I never understood the advice to take castor oil to induce labor. Yeah it probably works if people are still trying it, but do you really want to be having diarrhea while pushing out a baby??

Wow! The breast milk for conjunctivitis I knew about growing up, but there was never anyone with breast milk the few times I had red eyes. As for the gentian violet (GV as we called it) was much preferred by us kids for scrapes and broken skin better than iodine which hurt like you would not believe and we would beg our folks to apply GV instead of iodine. Guess which one we frequently got? I haven't heard anyone mention GV or breast milk antidote in a great long while, thanks for bringing back some childhood memories.

Not to gross anyone out...

but has anyone heard of rinsing the hair with the first urine in the morning if one has dandruff? Tried it once, still have dandruff (now use head & shoulders). Maybe I didn't do it right since I was not sure if the first urine is the one when one wakes in the middle of the night to pee or if it's the actual first pee when one awakens for the day. Urghh