NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:Can folk medicine cure what ails you?

It was a recipe for disaster: the stress of too many projects, the death of a third relative within 14 months and a plane trip just at the start of flu and cold season. I suppose it was inevitable that I would catch something.

Vic wrote last week’s column because I was too sick with a cold or flu to raise my head, much less string words together into coherent sentences. I am slowly returning to a state of semi-functionality.

The death in October of my cousin, Rob Wilson, led to my trip to Tucson for his memorial service. Rob was No. 4 of 12 Wilson cousins; I am the oldest. He was the first in our generation on the Wilson side to pass on. His death, coming so close on the heels of the deaths of my mother and son Bob, was upsetting to me.

I saw some of my Wilson relatives at Rob’s service. Mostly we sat, ate and told old family stories. My favorite memory of the weekend was hearing my Aunt Virginia (Wilson) Tevis, age 90, talk about her childhood in Indiana in the 1920s.

The Wilson family used to drive from Indianapolis to Tipton to visit Virginia’s Uncle George and Aunt Zorie (Wilson) Gaiser on their hog farm.

Virginia wondered how they all fit into the small Victorian-style farmhouse on their weekend visits. She and her five siblings and parents would visit the Gaisers and their two children, Koertney and Harriett. The adults slept in the two bedrooms, while all of the children slept together on the living-room floor.

Koertney, like so many Wilson men, died young, and Harriett inherited the farm. My father took my brother and I there on nostalgic trips. Even in the 1950s, there was still no indoor plumbing. We used an outhouse, reached by a hike through the chicken yard.

I always wondered why they built the outhouse in the chicken yard. An old hand pump just outside the kitchen was used to pump water. Virginia remembered that they had to pour hot water over the pump to prime it in the winter.

As I struggle with this cold/flu, I recall some old Hoosier remedies for colds. As a young teen, my father lived on the Gaiser farm. Aunt Zorie made him wear an asafidity bag around his neck to ward off colds.

An asafidity bag contained a variety of foul-smelling substances, such as garlic, onion and skunk oil, mixed with bear grease. By the time my dad was growing up, bear grease was hard to come by, so Aunt Zorie used goose grease instead.

The basic premise of this old Native American custom was that the bag warded off the evil spirits that cause illness. Actually, the stink kept people a safe distance away so that the bag wearer wouldn’t catch whatever illness they had. I could have used an asafidity bag in the airport. People were coughing all around me.

Many old-time cold remedies involve alcohol, which isn’t good for a sick person. One Hoosier cold remedy says that you should put your hat on the bedpost, go to bed and drink whiskey until you see two hats. I prefer hot lemon zinger tea with honey.

My mother used to tell stories of how her grandmother, Louisa Caroline (Hedrick) Thomas, “cured” her of a whooping cough when she was a child. Louisa was a medicine woman in the late 1800s in Terra Haute, Ind. In cases of cough or chest congestion, my great-grandmother used onion poultices.

There are many recipes, but most involve baking or boiling onions, mashing them into pulp and mixing them with cornmeal, flour or bread to make a paste. The hot mixture was wrapped in cheesecloth or a tea towel and applied to the patient’s chest.

Early pioneers in this area used horehound candy for coughs. Other pioneers used a mix of molasses, elderberry syrup and brandy to combat colds. These home remedies were of little use during the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19, in which 28% of Americans were infected and 675,000 died.

Influenza is still a serious disease and a killer of children and the elderly. Between 5 and 20% of the U.S. population gets the flu each year. More than 200,000 are hospitalized due to complications of flu, and about 36,000 people die from it annually.

This is not a disease to be treated lightly — or with whiskey or onion poultices. If complications such as sinus infection or pneumonia arise, seek medical help.

It’s hard to tell the difference between a cold and the flu based on symptoms. Colds are caused by rhinoviruses, and the flu is caused by a variety of influenza viruses. Tests can distinguish between them only during the first two or three days of illness. Most turn out to be colds. Only 0.9% of the cases submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for analysis so far this year were flu.

The CDC has good information about colds and flu at www.cdc.gov/flu. Probably the best thing to do is get a flu shot every fall, especially if you are over 60. A number of different flu strains circulate each winter season, and the shots should protect against most strains. As for me, I’m headed back to bed with another cup of hot tea. Rest and fluids are still the best treatment.