Friday, July 17, 2009

WIVES TALE: LEG CRAMPS

Anyone who has experienced leg cramps knows how uncomfortable they can be, especially if you get them at night. Unfortunately, doctors have not had a lot of luck treating legs that cramp or are restless at night.

Because of this lack of treatment for a long, long time, this was the perfect ailment to be solved by an old wives tale. One of the more common says that a bar of soap between the sheets at night will not only stop the leg cramps, but cure them from coming back again.

There are variations of the old wives tale that say you must use the bar of soap just once, while others say it needs to be used for one week or as long as one month.Unfortunately for those that have leg cramps, this is an old wives tale that has not proven true for many if any people. This probably started as an attempt to find a cure for painful leg cramps, but it has not proved very effective.

Soap in the sheets, huh? Interesting. They have some products now but the best way for me to avoid being kicked is to feed Tom a banana every day.

As an after thought, since it is an old wive's tale, I am wondering if, since they did not change there beds as much as we do today, maybe at least, the bed smelled better. Well, that doesn't make sense either, because the soap was lye soap!

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