There will not be any person in the world who has never been ill in his life. But thanks to modern technology and medicines that nowadays make them easy to recover quickly. But now a question may be arising in your mind that in the old times when there was neither such technology nor any such medicine, then what kind of medical practices the people must have followed to cure a disease. They used to do such strange things that you would never want to do, like, can you eat a tapeworm to overcome obesity? It sounds terrible but it was usually done by the people in the past. Today we will discuss some such medical practices in history that seem weird the way they were performed.
The World's Craziest and Strangest Medical Practices Ever Performed
Mental illness is considered a major disease in the field of medical science and during the emergence of modern technology, the right treatment was found to cure it. But about 100 to 200 years ago, getting treatment for mental illness was no less than a curse. Because people who were suffering from this disease were treated in such a way that they did not even survive. In 1936, a neurosurgery called lobotomy was very prevalent in America, also known as leucotomy. Every year, around 5000 people were treated with this neurosurgical treatment. Lobotomy was generally performed by two simple surgical instruments, each consists of an 8cm steel spike, attached to a wooden handle. In this treatment, people were first given an injection of anesthesia, then Lobotomy instruments were drilled into the upper part of their eyes so that its pointed portion reached the brain and from that, the part of the brain could be fixed where the problem is. But this method did not go too well with the patient, rather he would become even more insane. In most cases, they were died mercilessly by severely brain-damaged, and others later committed suicide. Not a single person was completely cured by this method and in 1970 this treatment named Lobotomy was completely banned.
There are many people in the world who are overweight, and they always try to do many things to lose their weight, like, someone uses green tea and someone uses lemon water or some other products to put their weight down. But in the 1800s, when people had to lose weight, they used to eat a capsule that contained eggs of tapeworm and when the capsule reached inside the stomach, tapeworm would come out of these eggs. As a result, the tapeworm will grow inside your body and eat whatever you are eating. The main idea behind this horrifying process was that you can eat whatever you want and still lose weight as tapeworm is eating all your "extra" calories. And once the desired weight was achieved, then to get rid of these unnecessary parasites, dieters had to follow certain methods, including pills or special devices. One such device was used to lure tapeworms through the digestive system by inserting a cylinder with food. But there was no surprise that during this practice many patients choked to death before the tapeworm was successfully removed.
There are many such diets in the world that you can eat to stay alive and among those diets, some contain all kinds of nutrients that will keep us healthy even if we eat them only to survive. But some people always remain in searching for such a diet which after eating, they can become slim as well as healthy. Dealing with this problem, in 1976, Dr. Roger Linn introduced a magic weight loss diet and named it 'The Last Chance Diet'. Actually, this diet was not a magic, but a liquid diet. According to Dr. Roger Linn, by taking this diet every day, you will not need to eat anything else and you would start dropping weight immediately. But this liquid diet was nothing but a liquid named Prolinn drink which contains very few nutrients, being low in vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes, and has only 400 calories of energy. We know that a healthy person should consume around 2000 to 2500 calories per day. This drink was generally made from crushed animal horns, tendons, hooves, bones, and hives which was of no use. But Dr. Linn started selling it in bottles by adding flavors and coloring to it to make it look more appealing in spite of having many nutritional deficiencies. After consuming this drink people started losing their weight very quickly up to 10 to 30% of their body weight and then suddenly dropping dead. This drink caused about 60 deaths over a short period of time and Dr. Linn was blamed for such a poor-quality drink and the deaths caused by it.
When Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie discovered Radium, it became the 19th century's greatest discovery of science. But after its discovery, people started considering radium as a magical thing, and big companies started mixing radium in everything like chocolate, toothpaste, and packed water. Radium began to be used by companies of that time in toys and watches, which made it shine in the dark, and at the same time, people started using it in cosmetics, including powders and creams that promised to rejuvenate and brighten the skin. Along with this, its use was also started in the treatment of a disease named Erectile dysfunction. But when people came to know that radium radiation could kill them too, they stopped using it. But the use of radium ended in the use of things in daily routine in the 1960s, nowadays, instead of radium, other chemicals are used to make toys and watch glow in the dark, which is not considered harmful.
Mercury is a very dangerous substance, death is confirmed by eating it and hence doctors also refuse to eat fish, which has high mercury content. But hundreds of years ago mercury was used to treat a disease called Syphilis. Syphilis is an STD that is a sexually transmitted disease, which leads to death if not treated well. Today, penicillin is used to cure it, but from the 1400s to 1950 people used mercury to cure this disease. People used to rub it on their skin, inject it into the body and even eat small amounts of it to cure syphilis, but many patients died of mercury poisoning. Mercury never worked well to cure this STD, but mercurous chloride was being used in the late 19th century to cure it so that mercury could be used in very small amounts.
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