(woman screaming)
- Five jaw-dropping medical procedures
that may or may not still be used today.
You're gonna want to hear this.
Today's medicine is state-of-the-art
and boundary pushing.
Medicine in the past, however, not so much.
Truly barbaric and terrifying procedures
all in hopes of advancing medicine.
- For the future!
- Today we are breaking down five past medical procedures
that were shockingly used to treat patients.
Plus, are they still used in medicine today?
- [Doctor] Set vent to 42 for peak.
- Number five terrifying medical procedure, bloodletting.
Nowadays in modern medicine,
losing a ton of blood is a bad thing.
The goal is to stabilize the person
and stop the bleeding as soon as humanly possible.
But what if I told you
that this was not always the case?
In fact, doctors encouraged blood flow.
For thousands of years, bloodletting,
or removing the blood from a person,
with the goal of treating a medical condition,
was one of the most common procedures performed by doctors.
The belief was if a person was ill,
there was an imbalance in the body.
And the thought was to release the blood
over several days, this would restore
the balance to the body.
But there were a lot of risks to bloodletting.
It puts people at risk for infections,
organ failure, and even death,
with the most common cause of death being blood loss.
Do you think we still use this practice today in medicine?
Yes, it's no longer used
to treat every ailment under the sun,
but in a very limited way, it can be quite useful.
If a patient has say hemochromatosis, for instance,
doctors will in fact remove blood
from your body on a regular basis.
But nowadays it's done more like donating blood
than yesteryear's bleeding out process.
Number four radical medical procedure, a lobotomy.
Our next barbaric and infamous medical procedure
may be the most feared of all time.
The lobotomy was a surgical procedure
in which the nerve pathways
in a lobe or lobes of the brain
were severed from those in other areas.
The belief was that mental illness
was caused by faulty connections
between the frontal lobes and the thalamus.
So the idea was that severing these connections
and regrowing them could treat symptoms
and agitations of the mental illness.
Sounds maybe kind of sort of reasonable,
but what if I told you that this radical therapy
was performed with an ice pick?
- That's bad, oh, that's bad!
- And patients were not always anesthetized
and often left in a vegetative state.
Brutal, for sure.
First performed in Portugal by a neurologist,
the procedure was later adapted
and popularized in the United States
in 1936 by Walter Freeman.
He performed tens of thousands of lobotomy procedures
and yes, he used an actual ice-pick-like tool
to hammer into the corner of an eye socket
and jiggle into the prefrontal portion of the brain.
This 10-minute procedure was believed to help
patients with schizophrenia, manic depression,
bipolar disorder, and many other mental illnesses.
According to records, there were
about 40,000 to 50,000 lobotomies
performed in the United States,
and about 1/3 of the lobotomies
were considered successful.
However, some were paralyzed during the procedures,
some left devoid of personality,
some died throughout the process.
And in 1967, Freeman was banned
from performing this procedure
after his patient suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage.
- Banned!
- Do we still use this procedure
to treat mental illness today?
No, not exactly.
Although the lobotomy procedure
was used well into the 1960s in the United States
and even into the 1980s in other parts of the world,
today, shock therapy and other psychosurgery
occasionally are used to treat patients
whose symptoms have resisted all other therapies.
Number three most terrifying medical procedure,
trepanation or trephination.
Trephination, aka drilling or scraping a hole
into the skull, is one of the most brutal-sounding
and surprisingly oldest forms of surgery that we know of.
For instance, at a burial site in France
dating back to 6500 BCE,
tons of prehistoric skulls have been found
to have trephination holes in them.
Some experts believe it could have been
that ancient humans may have done this
as a way to "release demons from the skull".
Some neolithic patients did actually survive
this demon-dispelling procedure,
as there is evidence of healing
on ancient skulls that have been found.
What do you think?
Is this alarming procedure still used today in medicine?
Well, sort of.
Nowadays we do in fact use a more advanced version
of this technique, called the burr hole.
This brain surgery is often done
after mild to even severe head injuries that have occurred.
In this procedure, a neurosurgeon
will drill a small hole into the skull
in order to drain excess blood from the brain.
I can't say I've ever seen a demon come out, though.
- Number two, a rhinoplasty.
Rhinoplasty, as we know it today,
is a surgery that changes the shape of one's nose.
This could be done to improve breathing,
for cosmetic purposes,
reconstructive purposes, you name it.
But back in 16th century Europe, however,
the motivating factor for this unpleasant procedure
may have been the result of the syphilis epidemic.
You see, syphilis showed up in Italy in the 16th century,
- Look who decided to show up.
- allegedly carried by sailors
after they went out into the world, um, exploring.
Syphilis develops in stages
with symptoms varying per stage.
One of the lesser known symptoms of syphilis,
it can also destroy the soft tissue of the nose
and lead to the collapse
of the cartilaginous bridge of the nose.
This is why one Italian surgeon, Dr. Tagelia Cozi,
developed a method for concealing
this nasal syphilis-induced deformity.
He created a new nose
using tissue and skin from the patient's arm.
A skin flap would be connected
between the arm and the face.
After three weeks of the awkward nose/arm growth process,
the skin graft could finally be completed.
The doctor would then separate the skin from the arm
and finish reconstructing the previously damaged nose.
- Love your new nose!
- This procedure wasn't always the most reliable.
There are reported cases of patient's noses turning purple
and blue in cold winter months, and falling off.
So do we still use this old-timey rhinoplasty
in today's modern world?
Not exactly, although the foundation is there,
and we do use skin grafts,
and reconstruct noses for all sorts of reasons.
Luckily for us today, we have come a long way
with reconstructive surgery,
and syphilis is usually treated
with a course of antibiotics.
Number one unpleasant medical procedure, a lithotomy.
Cutting of the stone was a jaw-dropping procedure
used by everyone from ancient Greeks, Romans,
Persians, all the way up to the early 1800s.
Put very simply, it was a procedure
that was used to remove bladder stones.
Bladder stones are hard masses of minerals in the bladder
and it can be crazy painful.
This was in fact a miserable, excruciating
old medical procedure that I'm about to describe to you,
so put down your lunch, maybe.
In an old-time lithotomy,
a patient would lay on their back,
feet spread apart, while a blade was passed
through their perineum.
You know the spot between your genitals and the anus?
Yeah, then from there, other surgical tools
may have been inserted into the urethra or the rectum
to further assist with removing the bladder stones.
Intensely painful.
And did I mention, it had a 50% mortality?
I know what you're thinking.
Is this crazy procedure still used today?
Yes, and no.
Today, if an adult gets a bladder stone,
which is super-rare,
doctors will do a procedure
called a transurethral cystolitholapaxy.
For this, the surgeon inserts
a small, rigid tube with a camera at the end
into your urethra, and up into your bladder.
From there, they do a lithotripsy treatment,
which they use ultrasound shock waves
to break up the stones into smaller pieces
can then be passed out of body.
Much less painful, and use lidocaine
to numb up the urethra.
All right, that's been a quick breakdown
of some unpleasant medical procedures
from our past, that we still kinda use today.
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and stay healthy, my friends.