you would be surprised how much folk ‘wisdom’ gets passed down through generations and continues to thrive. the thinking there being that natural is good because it can’t harm you (ignore mushrooms and beladonna, though). why take a pill produced in a lab somewhere, when you can just shove some onions in a sock?

I suspect that this is just communication breakdown, from times when people used herbs for medicinal purposes (liquorice root, for example, acts as an antiinflammatory by inhibiting breakdown of cortisol, and willow bark contains salicylic acid, a rough version of aspirin - the latter being acetylsalicylic acid, a derivative of it). but I think even the old witch in the woods would disapprove of onions in socks.