7 Home Remedies That Actually Work (and the Science Behind Them). By Laura Geggel. livescience.com. August 20, 2016. Folklore remediesThroughout the ages, people have sworn that odd remedies have cured their maladies. While some of these "treatments" sound outrageously strange by modern standards (such as eating lice to cure jaundice), others can work wonders — at least to a degree. 

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Almost every culture has some sort of popular home remedy — that is, treatments passed down through the generations by oral tradition, said author and illustrator Carlyn Beccia Cerniglia, who wrote "I Feel Better, with a Frog in my Throat: History’s Strangest Cures," (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). 
"If you ask anyone of a certain age, they’ll say ‘Oh, my grandmother used to do that to me,’" Beccia Cerniglia told Live Science. [The Surprising Origins of 9 Common Superstitions] 
Here’s a look at the science behind 7 home remedies that work, and in some cases, have inspired modern medicine. 
(Spoiler alert: Lice don’t alleviate jaundice (despite some very specific instructions). According to an ancient Spanish home remedy, people with jaundice were supposed to be fed nine live lice for nine days on an empty stomach, but without the patient’s knowledge, according to a 2013 study in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine.)