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The 10 Most Insane Medical Practices in History
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#5.
Urine Therapy
There's absolutely no evidence that urine therapy can cure a damn thing (and it comes with the added bonus of you getting to smell like the underside of a bridge or a downtown subway car). No, even the thing with peeing on jellyfish stings isn't true. On the bright side, armed with the new knowledge we've provided you, you can now try to pass those DVDs your girlfriend found in your closet off as medical instruction videos. #4.
Bloodletting
Bloodletting was one of the most enduring and popular medical practices in history, originated by the Greeks and used up until the 19th century for, well, basically everything. If you were feeling under the weather back in the day there's a good chance it was because you just had too much damn blood.
If you're wondering whether or not it works, the next time you're on your death bed with the flu, drag yourself out of bed and go downtown and give anywhere up to 4 quarts of blood; that's bloodletting for you, except you usually didn't get orange juice and a cookie after. Now, there is a chance you'll feel a bit better as you take a delirious blood loss inspired trip through the clouds on a golden unicorn, but we can assure you your flu probably won't be cured. #3.
Hard Core Diet Remedies
While a lot of the pills actually did help with weight loss, they also often caused fevers, heart troubles, blindness, death and birth defects. They couldn't have been all bad though, as in the 1950s and '60s women who took diet pills liked them so darn much they just couldn't seem to stop taking them. Of course, it might have had something to do with the fact that the diet pills of the '50s and '60s were in actuality bottles of pure crank. But hey, what's getting addicted to amphetamines when being ready for bathing suit season hangs in the balance? Oh, and since we just can't resist grossing you fine readers out, there have long existed stories that in the 1920s and '30s capsules filled with dehydrated tapeworms or tapeworm eggs were sold as diet pills.
There's some debate over whether these actually existed, but it seems like it could be true as various advertisements for the wormy pills have survived. Besides, if there was a market for the nut shock belt ... #2.
Trepanation
Trepanation is a fancy word for drilling holes in your head. This is actually the oldest surgical procedure known to man as humans have been intentionally knocking holes in their skulls dating back to the time of cavemen, giving hope to anyone who's had to watch the sitcom starring the Geico cavemen that all of them might die in a trepanation experiment horribly gone wrong in an upcoming episode.
Oh, and yes, a few brilliant individuals still practice trepanation to this day. To give you an idea of the oh-so-solid ground today's trepanation supporters' beliefs are built on, the biggest modern proponent of trepanation is a "Doctor" Bart Hughes. We put doctor in quotations marks because he never actually finished medical school. That's right kids, you, too, can be a college dropout and yet still go onto a career convincing people around the world to do incredibly retarded things, so reach for those stars. #1.
Female Hysteria Cures
Women and their mood swings, right guys? Right? You know what we're saying. Now, if you happen to be female don't be offended, there's no shame in admitting to the occasional bit of moodiness as according to 19th century doctors it's a symptom of a deadly serious medical condition (along with other symptoms such as nervousness, irritability and the dreaded "tendency to cause trouble"). That's right ladies, you may be a victim of female hysteria and not even know it.
Yes that's right, the cure for female hysteria was a doctor's hand down your bloomers until you weren't only thinking of England but screaming its name. Is it any wonder the list of symptoms for female hysteria was so long, literally any ailment could fit the diagnosis? In those sexually repressed times visiting the doctor's office must have been like a trip to Disneyland for most women.
Doctors of the day on the other hand were apparently, I don't know, gay or something since they actually objected to women's frequent desire to be "cured" by their magic fingers. Their solution to alleviate hand strain? They invented the vibrator, and thus this article comes to a happy ending. Nathan Birch also writes the sickeningly cute comic strip Zoology. He also wrote The 5 Creepiest urban Legends (That Happen to be True) for Cracked. |
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Perhaps the best part of this is that while most of the practices listed in this article have long since been dismissed as lunacy, urine therapy lives on to today (for your own sanity don't do a Google search for it). That's right, of all the crackpot theories listed here the one that endured is the one where people drink and bathe in piss.
Now, a person having too much blood may sound about as absurd as a person breathing too much air or you coming home to find too many naked supermodels in your bed. But, that's just because you don't know about the four humours. Don't worry, we won't hold your ignorance against you. Basically the theory was that the body was filled with four fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) called humours and that any imbalance in the four was the root of all illness. Apparently blood can be a bit of a space hog and thus often some had to be bled out to make room for more fun stuff like phlegm and black bile (a.k.a. diarrhea), or so the theory went.
Historically trepanation was most commonly used as treatment for seizures and migraines. Surprise, surprise. Having a gaping hole drilled in your skull (usually without anesthesia) did very little to help people's headaches or brain issues. Trepanation was also used as an extreme form of cosmetic/experimental body modification amongst several societies such as the Incans and Mayans. These societies also got largely wiped out, then a few hundred years later suffered the indignity of having an insulting Mel Gibson movie made about them, so it didn't really work out that well.
So, how exactly do you cure a so-called "condition" that coincidentally was diagnosed almost entirely to women who dared disobey their Victorian husbands? Glad you asked. The prescription for female hysteria was usually a good spot of doctor administered vaginal massage until the woman achieved "hysterical paroxysm."
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Vibrator = happy ending. That's the medicine I'm talking about! xD
Clinical depression isn't 'mild'. People don't commit suicide cause they feel a bit down.
My great-grandmother used to give my father moonshine. She'd bundle up my uncle and my father and drive them into the woods. She'd tell them to stay absolutely still and not leave the car under ANY CONDITIONS or they'd get the beating of their lives. Eventually, she'd come back with a few milk jugs of clear liquid. Once they got home, she'd add some peppermint candies and let them dissolve. That was her cough syrup. My dad spent the late 50s/early 60s drunk, which is probably why I'm so damn screwed up.
Today #10.Children's Soothing Syrups is called Baby Benadryl.
A few years back a woman was charged with involuntary manslaughter for accidently killing her baby for giving it too much.
ok poor choice of words but you did only quote the first to empower your rant. It has the toxins filtered by your kidneys in a days time. Deluted iv about 1-2 liters. So comparing it to mercury is kind of ridiculous. You would need to by living near a chemical plant and drinking your pee daily some weeks to see increase in bloodtoxin levels as your kidneys still do their job. And the stuff about nutrient well usually high protein in urine is bad. That shouldn't be there. And its not really about excess because particles over 50 nm and with negative charge should not cross that slits in the glomerulus.
TZaka: "Oh and urine is sterile, no harm in drinking it."
Mercury is sterile, too. Let's all go get a big glass!
You people do know that 'sterile' and 'non-toxic' are not synonymous, right? Sterile means 'free of pathogens'. So there should be no living bacteria in it, right enough. Oh, wait.
TK21: "Urine is sterile in that it does not contain toxins."
Well, apparently not everyone does know that.
And yes, I realize that the person who said that was STILL pointing out that drinking pee is a bad idea.
Dizzypdx: "Excess nutrients are passed into the urine, so drinking it will allow you to absorb those nutrients."
Are you actually suggesting that the human body is so inefficient that it just pumps out nutrients it could be using? Urine may well contain excess water-soluble nutrients, but only if your body already has an overabundance. Hence the word 'excess'. And if you do then ingest your urine to get those nutrients, considering that as we've already established, your body has a sufficient amount, what do you think is going to happen to that 'excess'? Yes, in theory, you could continue doing that until the amount in your body has decreased, and repetition after repetition, absorbing more and more 'til you get it all. Presuming you don't absorb any more of the vitamin in question from any other source. Me? I'll just take a multivitamin in the morning. A couple bucks for a bottle of 'em beats walking around with my breath smelling like a urinal sans cake.
Dizzypdx: "That is why a lot of animals eat feces."
Noooooooooooo . . . I don't think I should have to explain . . . different processes, different holes, and COMPLETELY different substances. If you get those two confused, heaven help you. I'm just gonna quote, here from "The Scoop on Poop" by Brenna E. Lorenz:
"Herbivores such as rabbits and rodents eat their own poop because their diet of plants is hard to digest efficiently, and they have to make two passes at it to get everything out of the meal. This is equivalent to a cow chewing its cud, only cows are able to re-eat their food without having to poop it out first. Another reason why animals eat poop is that poop contains vitamins produced by their intestinal bacteria. The animal is unable to absorb the vitamins through the intestinal wall, but can get at them by eating the poop. Another reason that animals such as dogs and flies eat poop is that poop contains a certain amount of protein."
Amount of information there that has anything to do with the supposed benefits of drinking urine: 0. Because, you see, one of them relies on getting at things that have made it through the digestive system, which is not the most efficient process in the body since it's not at all uncommon for things to make it through without being entirely digested (corn, anyone? No?). The other relies on the notion that your body has absorbed the nutrients into the blood, and that your kidneys, deciding to be completely fucktarded, just pull those nutrients out arbitrarily, while you still need them, and pump 'em into your bladder. One is reasonable (if you happen to be of a species that smells a turd and dinner bells go off in your brain), and the other is somewhat unnecessary at best, and crazy at worst.
Though, honestly, if you believe one's a good idea, then salvaging that last little bit of protein by going after the Baby Ruth in the toilet might not seem like a bad idea.
tl;dr version: Don't drink pee, K?
Urine is sterile in that it does not contain toxins. However, the whole point of urinating is to rid the body of nitrogen-containing compounds in the form of urea. When drinking urine, the bacteria in your stomach break down the urea into nitrogen again and you absorb the nitrogen into your system. This can cause mental degeneration, seizures, coma and death. Try telling people with kidney disease who need dialysis once or twice a week that you don't need your kidneys to work after all! Urinating is completely useless!
Urine, while sounding really disgusting, is actually rather healthy. Excess nutrients are passed into the urine, so drinking it will allow you to absorb those nutrients. That is why a lot of animals eat feces.
I would like to add that I both read the article and wrote this response while eating lunch. So I don't want to hear about weak stomachs from you males.
Oh and urine is sterile, no harm in drinking it. It is just stupid urine being toxins filtered out of your body.
Well lobotomies, not that crude method of the 40s, are still done in extreme cases of epilepsia as it is the only way to stop extremely bad and frequent cesures. Trepanation is a standard neurosurgical procedure to evacuate a haematoma (usually epidural) after head trauma. You could still use if no better option bloodletting if you have haemochromatosis(to much iron in your blood), because else your organs kind of get shut down one by one. So yeah like your style, probably good feedback, but really do some medical research before you right an article about something medical.
Haha so we get a f*****g electric c**k belt (well not me, I'm a stallion you see) - and women are getting to live out their kinky doctor fantasys for acting crazy!
The lobotomy reminds me of that scene in "From Hell". I never want one...
Well, this Female Hysteria cure explains how our country started out to be extremely sexist.
Your woman nagging you too much? Trying giving her an orgasm!
Trepanations are still induced today to treat brain injuries. Removing cranial bones and drilling holes help give room for swelling.
And breathing too much is bad for you. It is common knowledge that one can faint from hyperventilation and deaths have occured from breathing pure oxygen which is toxic.
I would rather have my skull trepanned than let someone strap an alectrified nut-belt around my waist.
And what happier ending is there than the vibrator?
Doctors disapproved of 'curing hysteria' because they were prudes. I'm not being stupid, victorian doctors tried so limit people having sex by saying it caused cancer of the womb, among a load of other things. They were as bad as priests when it came to opinions on sex.
That said, there were a lot of cases of supposed fake hysteria by woman, though I disagree with the accusation of "they did it for attention" ^^
The weird thing about trepanning is it didn't actually kill everyone it was performed on...they have found skulls with evidence of trepanning holes in that have actually healed over, meaning that the person lived to heal from trepanning! Also, many cultures believed [and still do today] that the hole-in-the-head thing was an effective way of releasing evil demon spirits that were posessing the body.
I can attest to the value of narcotics when you've got a cough. Vicodin works great when you've got a hacking cough and can't sleep :)
My grandmother talks about giving her kids paragoric for all sorts of things, including what it was meant for - diarrhea. It was good for teething, colds, flu, all sorts of things. It's a wonder my dad and uncle survived childhood.
as for the urin cure i have an aunt who uses her childrens urin to cure pink eye when they get it, now that sounds fun, " hey mom my eye itches" "its ok get your sister to pee in it, youll be alright."
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Urine has toxins in it! That's what it's for, to flush the toxins filtered out by your kidneys! Jeezum crow...