Grandma’s Cures

I’ve always been interested in Grandma’s cures from a prepping perspective. They have been handed down from a time where medicines were not available and people had to create their own medicines and cures using only what was available around them.

Modern medicine took that and expanded it significantly to make the medicines we have today due to technological advances that allowed refinement of the active ingredients and the capability of testing them under controlled situations. This advance allows us to live significantly longer than we used to and increased the survival rate for any injuries or illnesses we suffer from.

These advances continue to be made and it seems like every week there is some new discovery and hope for treating illnesses we are not yet able to cure. The progress being made increases our life span and cures more ills than ever before.

All that means nothing if we have an event. Most of our medicines are restricted by the government and will not last very long after the suppliers stocks are depleted. Even if you shot off the mark and raided a chemists the shelf life of some items are short even if you store them correctly. Insulin is one such medicine that needs careful storage and when medicines go off they do not perform their expected function and in some cases can even become poisonous. Not good. Not good at all.

So we will be forced to go back to our old cures. These did not have very good success rates compared to modern medicines and so you can expect our recovery rate for even minor injuries to plummet and our life span to do the same. People born after an event will have much shorter life spans than us with infant mortality rates shooting through the roof and what is not an issue today so that we don’t even think about it like a broken tooth or rib may very well become fatal injuries. We will need to be very careful even opening cans, building or even everyday jobs will have a new danger.

So we should be stocking up on what medicines we can and making sure they are stored correctly as well as knowing how long they will last and their actions on expiry.  This, like all prepping, is a stop gap measure to allow you to transition as no matter how much you store it will eventually run out or expire.

Which means we must also learn about how people treated injuries and disease before the age of modern medicines. Sure the survival rate may have been 2% or 3% and with Grandma’s tried and tested cures it may have gone up to 5% or 6% but that is still an improvement. These tales are passed down because every success was a victory against death and disease and through a lot of deaths these cures were discovered and passed on. Unfortunately, some are just rubbish and not worth the paper you will write them down on but there are quite a few that are recognised and used by modern medicine even now.

Nowadays of course we use modern medicines because they are available and only those who know what they are doing use home remedies for anything and certainly not for anything serious. Just look at Steve Jobs and his attempt at home treatments. However after an event all bets are off and instead of a 80% cure you are facing a 2% or 3% survival rate then that extra 2% or 3% is not to be ignored.

Start stocking up on meds and learning what you can about cures you would laugh at if someone suggested them now.