When your doctor is hovering over you with a huge needle, it's natural to be nervous.
But it could be so much worse.
In the not-so-distant past, the treatment was often worse than the disease.
Here are some horribly unhealthy things people used to think were good for you.
This'll get your goat
Never underestimate the desperation of a man whose manhood isn't doing what it's supposed
to.
While impotence treatments today are safe and commonplace, it used to be a pretty dicey
field.
And it doesn't get much worse than when a quack "doctor" in the 1920s pitched the idea
of transplanting goat testicles into human scrotums to restore male virility and fertility.
This quack was John Richard Brinkley, whose story was made semi-famous in the acclaimed
2016 documentary Nuts!.
Brinkley - who had zero legitimate medical education or training - scammed countless
men into coming to his hospital and having their genitals mutilated, partly by buying
a radio station to advertise his 100% ineffective and dangerous surgeries.
While battling what ultimately amounted to more than a dozen wrongful death lawsuits,
Brinkley ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Kansas governor, but his cons eventually caught
up to him.
In 1941 he was sued into bankruptcy, and he died penniless a year later.
Give it a rest
Rest is a good thing, sure, but the so-called "rest cure" pioneered by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell
in the Victorian era was anything but restful.
Mitchell's supposed cure was primarily used to treat women who were perceived as "hysterical"
or too "independent" - basically any woman who wasn't being docile and subservient to
men.
Free-thinking women were at high risk of being prescribed a rest cure, and some of the more
famous victims included The Yellow Wallpaper author Charlotte Perkins Gilman and novelist
Virginia Woolf, famously played by Nicole Kidman in The Hours.
A woman prescribed to a rest cure was mandated to at least six weeks of enforced bed rest
without visitors.
Some patients weren't allowed to talk, read, or write, and were bathed and fed by a nurse.
A near-constant diet of fatty milk products were often force-fed, essentially turning
adult women into infants.
Blowin' smoke
Brushing your teeth and flossing every morning and night might be annoying sometimes, but
at least our mouths are not festering cesspools of rot, cavities, and disease.
Toothpaste is the dental industry's magic bullet, and whatever brand you squeeze onto
those bristles, you can be reasonably sure it's helping preserve your teeth.
Unless you're using an old tube of tobacco toothpaste.
Yep: tobacco toothpaste.
According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, there was an unfortunate misconception
in India for decades that tobacco was somehow a beneficial ingredient to put in your toothpaste
or tooth powder.
Not surprisingly, the practice of using tobacco toothpaste - better known as "creamy snuff"
- proved just as addictive as cigarettes, particularly among male schoolchildren.
Tobacco toothpaste was finally outlawed in India in the 1990s.
Meth malpractice
In the mid-1930s, a Berlin pharmaceutical company started selling a popular medicine
called Pervitin, which was said to boost your alertness, make you perform better, and generally
supercharge your day.
Sounds great, right?
Pervitin was sold across Germany as the best coffee substitute ever, and Nazi soldiers
loved the tablets so much they fondly nicknamed it "pilot's salt."
The problem?
Pervitin was actually meth.
But Nazi Germany was so enthralled with Pervitin that the drug was freely distributed to the
troops, meaning quite a number of Gestapo soldiers became hooked on the stuff.
The biggest meth fan of all, though, might've been Adolf Hitler himself.
Hitler's manic hypochondria led to him doing a lot of weird treatments, and by the end
of his life, he received daily pill cocktails and hard drug injections, including methamphetamines.
In too deep
Today, people diagnosed with schizophrenia are generally treated with a combination of
medication and psychosocial therapy.
However, from the 1930s until nearly 1960, the dominant treatment was deep insulin coma
therapy, where patients were induced into a coma on a near-daily basis through heavy
injections of insulin.
The scary practice was famously depicted in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, which shows
mathematician John Nash undergoing the procedure.
Even at the height of its popularity, insulin coma therapy never produced effective results.
But there were enough confirmed deaths and brain injuries that a brave doctor named Harold
Bourne finally sounded the alarm in 1953.
Bourne's demand for more evidence put him at war with the powers-that-be, and though
he was blacklisted at the time, his criticisms eventually led to the treatment falling out
of practice, saving thousands of lives.