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The Moscow News. Got a headache? Put a cabbage leaf on your head

Got a headache? Put a cabbage leaf on your head. Toothache? Garlic is your answer. Drinking a shot of vodka will help cure a cold. If you happen to be suffering from an open wound, slap some badger fat on it and your cut will be healed in no time.

Russian culture is packed with folklore about health and wellness. For your every ache and pain, the average Russian will have a wealth of advice to offer - not only about already-evident maladies, but also about preventative care.

Some of these beliefs are so fiercely held that Russians (pushy babushkas being the most infamous demographic) have earned a reputation for approaching strangers in the street and heatedly scolding them for acting in an "unhealthy manner."

Such offenses can be as arbitrary as reading a book on a cell phone, which, according to the scolder, will damage your eyes. A parent can get reprimanded for letting their boy's hair grow too long, which might be a sign that his hair will fall out later.

To a Western expat, Russian ideas about wellness can seem illogical.

"Last fall, I was playing with my children outside and sat down to rest for a couple minutes on some steps," Tanya deLaney, an American expat and mother of two, told The Moscow News. "A Russian woman immediately came up to me and started yelling at me. She was furious! She told me that sitting on the ground was extremely dangerous, and that I wouldn't be able to have any more children."

For Russians, sitting on a "cold surface" - which might mean snow, but also includes stairs or the ground, even during summertime - has the potential to be quite harmful to a woman.

"Sitting on [a cold surface] is dangerous because there is a disease, a urinary tract infection [UTI], that you can catch," Irina Sokolskaya, a middle-aged Moscow housewife, told The Moscow News. "It's an anthropologist's disease, by the way, because in their work they have to sit on the ground often. If you sit on something cold you can catch a UTI and it stays with you for the rest of your life."

If left untreated, UTIs can cause permanent bladder and kidney damage or even female infertility. As such, sitting on a cold surface is regarded in Russia as highly dangerous to ladies' health, and emotions on the topic can run hot.

One example, deLaney said, comes from 1985, when Ted Turner, the American philanthropist and media mogul, was preparing for the 1986 Moscow Goodwill Games. Turner founded and organized this international sports competition as a response to the Cold War-inspired political turmoil that affected the official Olympic Games in the 1980s.

"Turner constructed a stadium with concrete seats to host the majority of sporting events, and allegedly was accused of plotting to render Russian women infertile," deLaney explained. "I've never been able to verify the story, but it's been related to me by Russians so outraged it seemed like they had discovered a secret mass murder plot."

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