A sprain can be a very painful thing. The sprain of any joint can tear up the tissues around the joint causing a lot of swelling and redness. Depending on what joint you sprain, you can be out of circulation for a while and it can be costly depending on what you are doing in your life at the moment.

I remember as a child I would be spraining my ankles almost every month. There were times when I had to be taken to special bone setters because I would actually dislocated bone on some occasions. When I wasn’t spraining an ankle, which as I have said was almost a monthly affair, I would be spraining a finger because I had the most natural ability of catching any ball with the tips of my fingers. You can say that I spent most of my time as a child with one kind of sprain or another.

My grandmother, who was a certified nurse and who also practiced many forms of natural healing, recommended an interesting cure for all the sprains that I used to get. This cure greatly increased my recovery time and usually had me up in about in a few days. I can honestly say that without this bit of home remedy, I would have spent most of my childhood sitting down.

My grandma called this cure ‘salmuera’. It basically consisted of taking a large pot of very hot water and adding at least a half cup of salt to that water. The hotter the water the better, and the saltier that the water was the better as well. I remember I used to cry sometimes more at having to put my foot inside this pale of incredibly hot water than when I would actually strained the ankle in the first place. It was always worth it though because I was able to get moving again in a short period of time.

I highly recommend this little home cure to you if ever you strain something yourself. If you strain an ankle like I did; you can fill a bucket with water, as hot as you can stand, and add at least a half a cup of salt to this water, the more salt the better. Stick your foot up to the strained area and try to keep your foot in there as long as you can. It could be that you will not be able to keep it in there for a very long time because the water will be so darn hot but try to keep your foot in there as long as you can. If you have to, you can put the foot in there as long as you can take it, stick your foot out and let it cool off for a bit, and then stick your foot back into the bucket.  Do this until the water  is  Luke warm.

You must be careful of course, you don’t want to make the water so hot that you burn yourself. Use your own judgment on this, if you turn on the tap and run it on hot water until you see water steam come from it, then you have water at about the right temperature. Add salt to the water and use a spoon to stir the water around until all the salt dissolves. Test the water and let it settle until you are able to actually put your foot or whatever you have strained into the water. Do this twice a day every day until your strain feels better.
How this home remedy works is that the saltwater sucks out some of the fluid from the cells around the strained joint. By doing this the salt water helps to reduce the swelling and it helps to tighten tissue that has been torn and twisted. The saltwater is actually compressing tissue back into place so that healing can begin much faster.

You will be surprised at how effective just one salt bath like this can be. As I said, I was usually up and around in a day or two and I was seldom benched for longer than that. Thank goodness because I needed to get myself in trouble in short order so that I might strain some other part of my anatomy.