Home remedies are good for us – and the NHS

Today’s medical treatment for major ills is unrecognisable, in sophistication and efficacy, from anything available during the immediate post-war period. We all live longer, pain is far better controlled, and antibiotics save lives – though fewer than they once did because of the cavalier way they have been overused. I did not take any at all until I was 20, and that was penicillin prescribed by a dentist. My children were brought up on it.

But I am not sure we are better off for minor conditions. Ambulances are demanded for what only needs a sticking plaster and it is estimated that more than half of those waiting five hours in A&E don’t need to be there at all. Many old home medicines still work well and if more people learned to use them it would free doctors up for the serious stuff. The medicine cabinet in my childhood home – really a grandly named shelf in the kitchen cupboard – always contained the following remedies (I may have forgotten some):

Witch-hazel, iodine, TCP (for cuts and grazes, bumps and bruises), camphor bags, Vicks VapoRub, Friars’ Balsam, ipecacuanha (coughs, colds, bunged-up noses, croup), smelling salts (feeling faint and funny), kaolin (hot poultices), embrocation (bruises, strains, muscle aches), Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne (upset tummies), Bismuth tablets, bicarbonate of soda (indigestion), oil of cloves (toothache), oil of rosemary (nits), pure lanolin (sore skin, eczema), Germolene (general salve, babies’ bottoms), corn plasters, olive oil (earache, babies’ cradle cap), white vinegar (nettle stings, insect bites), bandages, sticking plasters, nail scissors, fine sewing needles (whitlows and splinters), drum of salt (diluted, for cuts and sniffing up a bunged-up nose), cod liver oil (constipation), oatmeal (soaked in a bath, for chicken-pox and itchy rashes), aspirin and The St John Ambulance Pocket First Aid Manual.