Headache Cures: First, You Kill a Snake

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Headache Cures: First, You Kill a Snake
And other folk remedies for headaches.
by Kathleen Donnelly for MSN Health & Fitness
Want to know how to get rid of that pain in your head?

To cure headache, as one remedy in UCLA's massive Online Archive of American Folk Medicine suggests, take a rope used to hang someone and wrap it around your head.

Best make it a rope used to hang a criminal, advises another entry in the archive, a compendium that UCLA folklorists have been collecting for more than 50 years. If the rope was used in a suicide, states yet another, it has "special merits" and might help banish baldness and gray hair, too.

All of which begs the morbid question: Where does a person get a used hanging rope these days? EBay?

Eye of Newt, Toe of Frog

"You name something, and chances are somebody has used it for a headache," says Jan R. McTavish, assistant professor of history at Alcorn State University in Mississippi and author of Pain and Profits: The History of the Headache and Its Remedies. "Because headache is so wretchedly impervious to treatment, people thought, 'Your treatment is as good as mine.' "

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