Sour Orange

Yesterday I went for a jog after the sun started its descent and the heat was dissipating. It was lovely, a nice little break and it felt good to use my legs for traversing; as I believe I have described, we do far more driving than walking. Stupidly, after benignly twisting my ankle on a patch of gravel and continuing my jog anyway I twisted it again, the second time pretty badly. It isn’t very swollen but it doesn’t feel great and I have been limping a bit.

Stéphane told me that when he was a boy and would twist his ankle in futbol they had a man that worked at their house who would heat sour oranges ( indigenous and prolific here) in a fire, slice them open, pour on some salt and rub and massage it into his ails. He recalled it was actually sort of painful, the vigorous massage, but the day after it was as if he had no injury at all.

One of the woman at Jonto just got finihed massaging some (stove) fired sour orange onto my ankle. The massage was nice, the smell was pleasant and initially the side to side movements that hurt this morning don’t seem to hurt now… We will see how I progress as the day goes on.

A quick Wikipedia search on the sour orange reports that it is currently being used in diet supplements as a substitute for banned ephedrine. There was no information on how this might help with relieving musle and tendon inflammations, although Wiki says that when ingested sour orange can constrict blood vessels.

Regardless, it is an interesting and new treatment for me. If anyone has any info, please shoot me an explanation of why this (hopefully!) works so well.