Folklore has it that if you have a tapeworm, you can entice it out with a bowl of warm milk. This is one of those things almost everybody has heard, but no one knows where it came from. The origins are presumably lost in a misty past. Or a wormy past. Definitely a past in which the tapeworm figured large.
Anyway, there are two schools of thought... well, thought isn't exactly the right word in this discussion... let's say factions. There are two factions in the warm milk theory of enticing a tapeworm -- whether or not to place the milk in front of your mouth, or behind your... well, your behind.
In either case, the thought that someone would welcome a worm crawling out of either orifice just goes to show the lengths people are willing to go to when they're sick and just want to feel the hell better.
Not that tapeworm is a big problem here, currently, but with millions of folks in the US without health insurance, I figured there'd be more of this kind of 'wisdom' being passed around and, having some experience in the folk remedy arena, decided I'd write this handy guide to curing what ails you, without benefit of a doctor.
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