Urine therapy, animal dung treatments, arsenic, electroshock therapy, farts in a jar, you name it! Medicine has gone a looooooong way. That's all I can say. Read this post, and you will understand what I mean!
Let's begin: 5 Unbelievable Medical Practices in History!
1. Victorian Tapeworm Diet
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This diet was extremely popular in the early 1900s when women were concerned about their weight and maintaining a 16 inch waist. Women would ingest a tapeworm egg in the form of a pill. Once the egg hatched, the tapeworm would grow in the woman's body and 'eat' all the food she ingested. Thus, a woman could eat as much as she wanted without gaining weight ... Bad idea! Ingesting a tapeworm is considered dangerous and can lead to dementia, epilepsy, eye problems and more. What a way to loose weight!
2. Dead Mouse Paste
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This method was used way back in Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians would blend a dead mouse with other ingredients and apply to the painful tooth in hopes of stopping a toothache. Later on in Elizabethan England, people would slice a mouse in half and rub it on their warts hoping the wart would go away. Eww!
3. Trepanation
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Trepanation or trepanning was a 'surgical procedure' in which a hole was drilled into a person's skull exposing the dura mater. (This was performed without anesthesia! 😲) Even to this day, scientists are not exactly sure why this crude procedure was performed. But many people believe that this procedure was used to treat pain, such as epilepsy, blood clots and migraines. Others believe that trepanation was a way to release evil spirits in a mentally ill person.
4. Bloodletting
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Back then, people believed that too much blood was the cause of illness. Therefore, doctors preformed the infamous procedure: bloodletting. Doctors accomplished this procedure by removing large amounts of a person's blood in hopes that they would be cured. Bloodletting was performed in two different ways: venesection and leeching. A doctor would perform venesection by using a sharp object to cut open a person's vein and letting the blood flow into a container. In leeching, a leech was used to suck a person's blood (and theoretically the disease).
5. Curing Hemorrhoids with a Red Hot Poker.
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We should not take for granted the hemorrhoid ointments, gels and creams that we have today. Back then, people would put a red hot poker in the 'you-know-where' to get rid of stubborn hemorrhoids. Ouch!
Fortunately, medicine has dramatically changed. We have safer diets, better treatments for toothaches, ointments for hemorrhoids and safer ways to treat seizures and migraines. Currently, doctors go through years of schooling to find safer ways to heal people. You should be grateful that when you have a migraine, you can take a pill instead of having a hole drilled through your skull! Or if you have a hemorrhoid, you can rub some ointment on it instead of having a red hot poker jammed in the 'you-know-where!'
After writing this post, I had to ask this question: Aren't you glad to live in the 21st century?
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