- Treating syphilis with malaria?
Blowing tobacco smoke up your butt?
Buckle up, folks, this is in science fiction.
These are real treatments,
real patients used throughout history.
Thank God modern medicine has come a long way.
Oh, and I'll also tell you about a medical treatment
we use right now
that I think might be on its way out in the near future.
Let's get started.
Pee-whoop!
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Doctors used to recommend lobotomies
to treat mental health problems,
and a lobotomy literally means tearing apart your brain.
Feeling depressed, anxious
or simply have a nagging headache?
Have you considered removing part of your brain?
Well, many have for all of human history.
Lobotomies are one of the oldest
verified medical procedures historians know about,
thanks to the remains of humans from thousands of years ago,
that present clear evidence of rudimentary surgeries
in the skull.
In the earliest days of civilization,
seemingly across the globe,
the medical thinking was that if you had a problem
in your head, the head needed to be opened up.
This practice reached its apex in the US in the 1900s
when lobotomies were regularly performed.
Today, neurosurgery and lobotomizing
small parts of a patient's brain are still used
in highly specific cases, but the simple method
of cut out the frontal lobe of a crazy person approach
is no more and it's considered one of the more shameful eras
of worldwide medical history.
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Doctors used to recommend cannibalism to treat everything.
Throughout a large chunk of human history,
doctors in Europe regularly prescribed corpse medicine
or the practice of consuming the remains of dead people
for medicinal benefit.
The problem?
There was no medicinal benefit.
The thinking was that if you had a problem in your head,
you would eat the ground up remains of someone's head.
You see, this is why we don't put much stock into treatments
that make sense or experts believe in,
unless they're proven with evidence.
Obviously no such evidence that this barbaric practice
ever worked existed but that didn't stop apothecaries
from 16th and 17th century Europe
from turning a prophet selling blood marmalades.
Consider it the goop of the Renaissance.
It goes without saying,
consuming the remains of Egyptian mummies
or slain Roman gladiators does not cure an illness,
and in fact, it comes with the extremely high risk
of poisoning from eating decayed infected flesh.
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Milk is a lot like blood, right?
Blood transfusions are a life-saving procedure
often performed on patients
who have suffered serious trauma.
But throughout most of human history,
doctors didn't just have
a fridge full of blood to run to in emergencies.
In the late 19th century,
some doctors believed milk was a substitute for blood
because it contained many nutrients
and that the milk would eventually turn
into white blood cells to help fight off an infection.
White milk, white blood cells.
See how they got there.
Obviously, this didn't work,
but it didn't stop doctors from trying.
In one well-documented and frankly unbelievable case,
Dr. Joseph Howe treated a sick woman
with what he believed was a groundbreaking idea.
Not cow's milk, he said, but human milk.
A woman in the hospital actually donated
three ounces of breast milk,
which was intravenously injected
into the sick woman's veins.
Needless to say, the results weren't just ineffective,
but actually negative,
causing the patient's heart rate to spike
while she convulsed in pain.
Dr. Howe managed to stabilize the woman
by injecting her with morphine and whiskey.
To no surprise, she unfortunately died 10 days later.
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Doctors used to prescribe
the mosquito-borne illness malaria,
to treat another disease, syphilis.
I realize that sounds pretty outrageous,
but what's even weirder, is it actually work?
Syphilis is a bacterial infection
spread through sexual contact.
Prior to the widespread use of condoms,
and the invention of antibiotics,
the disease was rampant across the globe.
Suspected to have infected some highly notable figures
like Al Capone and Adolf Hitler.
Untreated syphilis in its late stage
spreads to organs destroying them from within,
leading to potential disfigurement or even death.
One way your body fights off infection
is by giving you a fever,
which creates an environment too warm for invading bacteria
to survive and one in which your immune system thrives in.
Why malaria?
Well, it's caused by a parasite of mosquitoes
that causes extremely high fevers
and we actually had a treatment for malaria.
So in the early 1900s, Julius Wagner-Jauregg had an idea.
Give us patients who were sick with syphilis,
the parasite that causes malaria,
allow the fever to spike, kill the syphilis,
and then use the medicine that already existed
to treat the malaria.
It was a bold idea that actually worked,
netting Dr. Wagner-Jauregg the Noble Prize
in Physiology and Medicine in 1927.
Malariotherapy was used all around the world
for the next couple of decades
until the invention of penicillin,
which is an antibiotic that kills syphilis
without having to resort to getting people sick
with other illnesses.
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Doctors used to recommend heroin to treat the common cold.
During the American Civil War,
the drug of choice to treat soldiers
suffering traumatic injuries was morphine,
a highly effective and addictive drug
derived from opium poppies, or an opioid.
It interacted with pain receptors in the brain
to virtually eliminate pain sensation in the body
and leave patients in a dream-like euphoric state.
While highly effective, it also resulted
in thousands of soldiers becoming addicted to the substance.
In response, Bayer, the pharmaceutical company,
began boiling the morphine in an attempt to reduce
the drug's addictiveness, and thus heroin was born.
Unfortunately, boiling morphine
doesn't make the drug less addictive.
In fact, it makes it more addictive
and capable of being mixed with other additives,
leading to far more extreme reactions in the body.
This didn't stop the medical establishment, and in 1906,
the AMA officially approved heroin for general use.
Doctors not only recommended heroin for extreme pain,
but for more common conditions like bronchitis,
tuberculosis, cancer, depression,
sluggishness, the common cold, old age,
or even a simple cough for adults and children alike.
The real impact of heroin became obvious soon enough,
as addiction and crime rates soared,
leading to federal regulation of the drug
and the AMA revising their previous recommendation.
Today, opioids are still prescribed,
however, many measures have been enacted
in hopes to bring down the soaring rates
of addiction and overdosing.
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Cure your rheumatoid arthritis
by staying inside the body of a dead whale,
something I never thought I'd say on this channel.
(static buzzing)
Look, this wasn't the practice that was endorsed by doctors,
but it was publicized in papers
as something people actually did.
The way the story goes is that a drunk Australian man
suffering from joint pain
dove inside the body of a dead whale
laying on the shore of Eden, New South Wales
in the late 1800s.
The man was a bit of a jokester
and was trying to make his friends laugh.
Disgusted by the smell
and the idea of touching a dead whale,
his friends didn't rushed his aid
and left him on his own for escape,
and upon leaving the whale,
he claimed it cured his joint pain.
The theory was that the fumes of the rotting whale
created an aerosolized treatment for his joint pain.
Advertisements literally popped up for whale hotels,
where those suffering from rheumatism
could stay while they waited for a deceased whale
to arrive on shore.
If you could survive 30 hours inside the dead whale,
your joint pain could be alleviated for up to a year.
Kind of sounds like those oasis disease-curing retreats
that make ridiculous claims about their resorts.
This one had a whale spin to it, if you know what I mean.
(screen beeps)
Of course, look, I can't believe I have to say this,
but there's no evidence that breathing decaying whale air
for 30 hours alleviates anything, let alone joint pain.
(movie reel whirs)
How about blowing some smoke up your butt
to save someone from drowning?
Native Americans regularly used tobacco
as a form of medicine,
something the Europeans noticed and took back home.
The idea of blowing tobacco smoke into someone's rectum
became the go-to method
of saving a drowning victim in England.
The theory was that someone who had nearly drowned
was cold and wet both inside and outside of their body,
so that if you blew tobacco smoke up someone's butt,
they would be warmed and dried out from the inside,
bringing them back to life.
Quickly, this practice expanded beyond drowning victims,
with doctors across Europe believing it was effective
at treating all sorts of things,
from headaches to hernias to cholera.
The practice was not only useless to patients,
but sometimes even dangerous for doctors.
Before the invention of bellows
or the contracting expanding device
that sucks and blows air, doctors had to blow themselves
and in the event that a doctor accidentally sucked
instead of blew, they would inhale a mouthful of contents
from the inside of the patient's rectum
which actually led to infection and death of some doctors.
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Doctors used to recommend smoking tobacco
as a treatment for asthma.
Yes, actually recommended.
The historical thinking was that asthma
and other respiratory illnesses
were caused by an accumulation of cold phlegm in the lungs
and the best form of treatment for this cold phlegm
was the inhalation of warm smoke
from burning tobacco or stramonium.
Dr. William Osler,
the Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University,
went as far as encouraging asthmatic
to sample a variety of cigarettes.
It didn't stop there, though,
as Dr. Osler also encouraged asthmatics
to fill their bedrooms with smoke prior to sleeping
to ward off a nighttime asthma attack.
While asthma can be treated
by medicine consumed from an inhaler,
inhaling tobacco smoke would have the opposite effect.
Kids whose parents smoke have higher rates of asthma attacks
and are more likely to end up in the hospital.
That's because smoke from cigarettes
makes airways swollen and narrow, essentially doubling down
on the problem asthmatic are already facing.
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Doctors used to recommend draining your body of fluids
to treat literally everything.
The practice was known as balancing the humors.
For thousands of years,
dating back to Hippocrates in ancient Greece,
the medical establishment believed that all illnesses
were caused by an imbalance of the humors,
blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile.
Doctors believed that a healthy person
had a perfect balance of all four,
and that in order to cure a sick person,
you simply had to rebalance them.
The method by which they would achieve this balance
was sickening and painful.
Doctors would cover you in bloodsucking leeches,
induce vomiting or diarrhea,
or burn you to create pus dripping sores across your body.
But what they failed to realize
is that many of these instances,
it was the diseases that imbalanced these humors,
not the imbalanced humors creating the disease.
Look, obviously, putting an already sick person
through a circus of blood, sweat and tears
did not improve health outcomes
and actually usually led to the death of those patients.
Most notably, president George Washington,
who was killed by his doctors
while attempting to balance his humors.
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Army doctors around the world
used to recommend methamphetamine to create super soldiers.
The drug was popularized worldwide
during the Second World War
when military doctors started recommending soldiers
take the drug to keep them alert, awake and energized.
American soldiers took the drug
to stay awake on the front line.
German soldiers took the drug
to Blitzkrieg countries like Poland in record time.
Japanese soldiers took the drug
before hopping in planes as kamikaze pilots.
Soldiers became addicted to this stuff
and companies started mass producing it worldwide.
Of course, the war came to an end and all of a sudden,
military warehouses had stockpiles of surplus meth.
It was then distributed nationwide by physicians
who recommended for a variety of conditions
like weight loss.
Abuse of the drug eventually led to its regulation,
thanks to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
Interestingly, meth is still prescribed by doctors
in the US today under the name of Desoxyn,
but this is only used
with very specific diagnoses like ADHD.
But what about the medical practices of today?
Well, we have certainly come a long way
since blowing smoke up your butt.
I believe there are probably
some medical practices we do today,
they're gonna be looked upon
and really judged heavily in the future.
One of those I think are colonoscopies.
Don't get me wrong and hear me out here.
Colonoscopies work in catching colon cancer early.
In fact, preventing some cases of colon cancer
by removing polyps before they turn into cancer.
But the practice of having to stick a camera
into someone's colon through their anus
is gonna be looked at rudimentary, at least I think so.
I think there's gonna be new technology
that's gonna allow us to either chemically detect
and there's already some early stages of this,
colon cancer or maybe even ways to enter the body
without having to go in through the rectum.
That's just my take.
Which one of the medical practices you think today
are gonna be judged heavily in the future?
Comment down below.
And look, these were some cringy medical practices,
but how about some horrifying medical devices
physicians actually used to use?
Click here to check these out.
As always, stay happy and healthy.
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