Home Biology Old Medical Treatments That Would Seem Insane To People Today
Biology By Joe Burgett -

Old Medical Treatments That Would Seem Insane To People Today
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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.

Old Medical Treatments That Would Seem Insane To People Today
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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

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