Bloodletting

• Time Period: 440 B.C. to Today

To be fair, we do still use bloodletting today in modern medical treatments. However, the most common use is for rare diseases like hemochromatosis and polycythemia in the developed world. It’s also used as alternative medicine in less developed nations as bloodletting is able to starve bacterial pathogens of iron. That slows bacterial growth and could help with infections. Of course, this makes sense as your immune system ends infection. Antibiotics only target infection symptoms. However, bloodletting is one of the old medical treatments that has been done for thousands of years now.

It goes back to Ancient Greece and Egypt. The infamous Greek physician Hippocrates believed the body was made up of four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. The idea was that the body needed to be in balance, so if you were sick then naturally the body must be out of line. You needed to them reduce something from one of the humors, and blood was often the easiest to remove for obvious reasons. That led to bloodletting being used to treat pretty much everything early on. The reason Hippocrates likely believed in it so much is that this could be effective for some stuff but not for everything.

Cigarettes Were The Perfect Asthma Treatment

• Time Period: 1920s to 1960s

Reading the above header, you might laugh a bit. Yet it’s true that many physicians used to believe cigarettes could help people with asthma problems. Of course, one would naturally think the worst thing for an asthmatic person would be smoking, but not them. It could be that they were able to partially coat the throat a bit, and offer some aid due to the use of nicotine involved. We did not realize how addictive nicotine was back then, nor did people consider what’s in cigarettes beyond this.

In the 19th and 20th Centuries, smoking was so widely accepted that doctors often smoked in the room while seeing patients quite often. Early cigarettes were a bit harder to use but by the 1920s, menthol was added into most to help with this. Menthol is a very useful thing that could potentially help someone with asthma or sinus issues. Doctors seemed to ignore the idea of using menthol on its own for a while, which resulted in the recommendation of cigarettes.

Use Of Methamphetamines

• Time Period: 1893 to 1980s

Today, we know methamphetamines are relatively dangerous to use, especially long-term. We should point out that this is not exactly like the type of meth you might find on the street. That can be made of various substances, which the original is not like. Chemically, they are not the same as recreational meth includes numerous chemicals you can find around your home. To be honest, when the drug was first put on the market, it made sense for companies to market it as they did. Methamphetamines are stimulants that can be powerful for the human central nervous system.

They can be helpful for obesity as the drugs are able to curb appetites. They’re also helpful for narcolepsy as the high they offer is able to give the brain stimulation that will wear off. Once it wears off, you’ll be tired enough to sleep. On top of that, they were once used to help with ADHD-related symptoms often. The issue is that, unlike with other stimulants or even amphetamines, the role of methamphetamines has been reduced due to causing even more problems for humans. Physicians now rarely prescribe medications with this in them due to the likelihood of neurotoxicity and high addiction rates.

The Once “Wonder Drug” Known As Radium

• Time Period: 1918 to 1930s

Today, we are well aware that radiation and anything associated with it can be toxic to the human body. It is such an issue that we have to handle all radiation usage with extreme caution. Both Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium back in 1898 and spent their entire lives studying radioactive materials. It is due to their sacrifice that we know the effects of radiation on the body. Both Marie and Pierre believed radium could be useful for a lot of things, and they were 100% right about that.

However, neither truly felt it needed to be used outside of specific needs. Yet quacks felt it could be used to cure numerous health complications. In the 1920s, some had the wild idea about adding Radium to drinks. One man named William J.A. Bailey invented RadiThor, which was basically radium dissolved in water. The Harvard drop-out was not a medical doctor but claimed the drink could “cure the living dead” and offer “perpetual sunshine.” He said it could cure impotence, aging, and treat arthritis too! Unsurprisingly, this was all crap. Several even died from radium poisoning.

Ear Candle

• Time Period: 1600s to Present

The Ear Candle has to be one of the craziest things one could ever think to use. While there are many old medical treatments that come off as odd, they can be forgiven usually. This is because there was at least some way to understand why the treatment was in play. Yet a candle in the ear just seems obviously dumb. Usually, a person laid down on their side with one ear up. A candle, often at least 12 inches, was placed inside the ear and lit.

The goal of this was to remove stuff from the ear like debris or other particles. The belief too was that the heat created some type of suction to remove even earwax out of the ear and connected it to the candle. Not only was this almost never effective, but worse, candle wax fell into the ear. This can cause burns and potential ear infections. Beyond that, people could partially lose hearing in the ear the wax fell into as wax build-up would be stuck inside the ear. Leading to impairment.

Trepanning

• Time Period: 5,000 B.C. to 1800s

Trepanning began simple enough, as did many old medical treatments. This happens to be the oldest known surgery humans performed on one another. In fact, it is such an old procedure that it has been traced back to 7,000 years ago in some of the earliest known civilizations. The procedure involves boring or essentially drilling a hole in the skull. Initially, the idea was that you could let any build-up of pressure out this way or even potentially evil spirits that have gathered in there.

It was widely assumed that spirits were the ones behind any mental illnesses or disorders. Some done in Peru were performed for emergency needs. People might be involved in war and could have skull fractures from it. To remove excess bone fragments, trepanation would be done. However, the most common reason was the assumption it could stop migraines, epilepsy, abscesses, blood clots, and much more. It didn’t help at all, and many even died from the surgery.

Psychic Surgery

• Time Period: Early 1900s

Imagine someone telling you that they were having surgery soon – not one performed by a regular surgeon but by a psychic person claiming to be capable of healing them. You’d likely want to slap them back to reality. Psychic surgery is a pseudoscientific procedure that is a form of medical fraud based on the illusion that a psychic could access otherworldly beings to heal you. Worst of all, they did this with their bare hands. Often, they used a finger to cut into the person and through sleight of hand, show that the person had lesions or even fake animal parts inside them.

Some psychics would actually really remove a part from a person’s body, whereas others would only cut in but not really remove something. The United States FDA and FTA does not allow this to be performed in the country but it does still happen elsewhere. Originally, it popped up in Brazil and the Philipinnes but it has since fallen out of favor there too. However, in spite of being one of the old medical treatments that have shown zero benefits, it has not been made illegal in either country. It is still legal in most African countries too as well as several South American ones.

Sacrificing Animals Or Humans To Save Another

• Time Period: 6,000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.

Sacrificing yourself to save another seems noble, but not when it comes to medicine. It used to be that people believed a God or Gods were in control of everything. Therefore, in order to get over sickness or a disorder, you needed to sacrifice people or animals to appease them. The same happened to ensure that rain comes or to make famine comes to an end. One very popular thing to do would be to have a priest sacrifice an animal near the person that needed to be “healed.”

If the person never healed from the problem they were going through, it was clear that they must have angered the Gods. Even if a child was the one affected, this would be the assumption. Either that or the Gods were punishing the child in place of a mistake their parent(s) made. If the person did recover, then the Gods must have been appeased. The sacrifice of an animal was performed to honor the God or Goddess that must have been angered.

Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

National Institutes of Health

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)

Journal of Craniofacial Surgery

World Journal of Gastroenterology

British Columbia Medical Journal

Mayo Clinic

Oxford University

Yale University

Harvard University

University of Florida

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Snopes

History.com