Your father was probably using a variation of my father's "magic cookie" cure.
When a little kid, be it neighbor or relative, was crying over a scraped knee or some other minor mishap, Dad would offer to fix it with a magic cookie. The kid would invariably agree, and Dad would disappear into the kitchen, and then reappear with an Oreo, or a Chips Ahoy, or any other ordinary cookie. He'd tell the kid, very seriously, that this was a magic cookie, and that if they held it on the part that hurt, the pain would go away and they could stop crying. Then, once the pain went away they could eat the cookie. But, they couldn't eat the cookie until the pain went away.
It worked every time....