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#Post#: 1243--------------------------------------------------
Unbelievable Things 😲 Doctors Used to Recommend
🤦‍♂️
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: August 18, 2023, 2:26 pm
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August 17, 2023 by Mikhail Varshavski, DO
Mike Varshavski is a board-certified family physician and
[glow=teal,2,300]social media influencer[/glow] with more than
10 million subscribers.
[center]Unbelievable Things 😲 Doctors
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/>Used to Recommend 🤦‍♂️[/center]
[move]Decayed whale fumes, blowing smoke in the rectum, and
more[/move]
Following is a partial transcript of this video :o
HTML https://youtu.be/BlgTQN-esjM
where Mikhail Varshavski, DO -- who
goes by "Dr. Mike" on social media -- reviews
[glow=red,2,300]antiquated medical practices[/glow].(note that
errors are possible):
Varshavski: Treating syphilis with malaria? Blowing tobacco
smoke up your butt? Buckle up, folks, this isn't 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!
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 U.S. 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.
Doctors used to recommend cannibalism
HTML http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/2/3-190419232147.png<br
/>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 profit 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. In fact, it
comes with the extremely high risk of poisoning from eating
decayed infected flesh.
Milk is a lot like blood, right?
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422145218.gif<br
/>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 3 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.
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 worked
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-040422164519-508103.gifhttps://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-120422122505-6702373.gif.<br
/>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. But why malaria? Well, it's caused by a parasite in
mosquitoes that causes extremely high fevers, and we actually
had a treatment for malaria.
In the early 1900s, Dr. 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.
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 [American Medical
Association] 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.
Cure your rheumatoid arthritis by staying inside the body of a
dead whale
HTML http://media.tumblr.com/c6492e4b47cfdbd50e74d285fde3c53e/tumblr_inline_mm3g4yCaZc1qz4rgp.gif,<br
/>something I never thought I'd say on this channel. 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 to his aid and left him on his own for
escape. 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. It
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. Of course, look, I can't
believe I have to say this, but there is no evidence that
breathing decaying whale air for 30 hours alleviates anything,
let alone joint pain.
How about blowing some smoke up your butt to save someone from
drowning?
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-080422122803.png<br
/>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. 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.
Doctors used to recommend smoking tobacco as a treatment for
asthma.
HTML https://soberthinking.createaforum.com/gallery/soberthinking/1-050422145533-5671050.gif<br
/>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 asthmatics 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 asthmatics are already facing.
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
[glow=red,2,300]sickening and painful[/glow]. 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 in 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.
Army 👿 doctors around the world used to recommend
methamphetamine to create [glow=maroon,2,300][b]🦍 super
☠️ soldiers[/glow].[/b] 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 it 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 U.S.
today under the name of Desoxyn, but this is only used with very
specific diagnoses like ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder]. 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 are going to 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 going to be looked at rudimentary,
at least I think so. I think there is going to be new technology
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/>
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/>that's going to allow us to either chemically detect -- and
there is 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.
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