5 – Urine Therapy,
- Forget rest, nutrition and exercise; an alarming number of cultures and people throughout history believed wallowing in urine was the key to good health.
- Urine therapy was said to cure an extensive list of ailments and promote good health if drank, applied to the skin or used to give a nice … bracing … urine enema. I wonder if vomit has any good health properties? Because I can feel my breakfast coming back up!
- The sad part is that even though all of these purported benefits have been disproved urine therapy is still practised today. Even peeing on a jellyfish sting has no scientific benefit, so keep it in the toilet or on tree trunks.
4 – Insulin-Coma Therapy,
- Insulin-coma therapy came about entirely by accident when a Viennese doctor named Manfred Sakel accidentally overdosed a patient on insulin overdose in 1927. The patient, who was a morphine addict, fell into a deep coma and awoke to discover that her addiction – and probably eight percent of her brain capacity – had disappeared.
- Sakel tried this again on another unsuspecting patient and found similar results. He was soon inducing insulin comas to schizophrenics and other patients. Some claimed to be cured of their afflictions, but that was probably just the brain damage talking.
- The dangerous therapy caused several casualties and was finally phased out in the 1960s. Sakel wouldn’t have been happy. I mean, if you want to make an omelette you’ve got to break a few eggs. Right?
3 – Hot Iron Treatment for Haemorrhoids,
- In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for disease sufferers to pray to patron saints for divine intervention. During the Seventh Century, an Irish monk named Saint Fiacre became the patron saint for haemorrhoid sufferers.
- He developed haemorrhoids from digging in his garden but was one day cured after accidentally sitting on a pointy stone. The stone is still around today and haemorrhoid sufferers visit it hoping for a similar cure.
- News of the miracle travelled until medieval physicians conceived the idea their white-hot cautery irons to treat the problem. Pulling and scratching them out with fingernails was another widely used solution.
- Eventually a Twelfth Century Jewish physician named Moses Maimonides wrote about his disapproval of the surgery and instead recommended the sitz bath, which is still the most common treatment for haemorrhoids today.
2 – Extreme Hot and Cold Therapies,
- For centuries, heat has been used to cure mental diseases. In fever therapy, fevers were induced by hot baths, electric heaters, and even deliberate infection with malaria. Before penicillin, it was the most effective way to treat syphilis, but patients had to be closely monitored as it came with a pretty high risk of death.
- Extreme cold therapy was the inverse therapy and was just as dangerous. Patients receiving this treatment were sometimes refrigerated three days at a time at temperatures as low as 20° F below a normal, healthy body temperature.
- Hydrotherapy was another risky treatment that bears little resemblance to today’s relaxing equivalent. Common in the early Twentieth Century, hydrotherapy patients usually suffered mental disorders and wrapped like mummies in towels that’d been soaked in icy water. Other times they were strapped with restraints in a cold tub for days at a time or sprayed with high-pressure water jets – sometimes while bound in a crucifix position.
1 – Lobotomy,
- Finally, we have everybody’s favourite mental illness cure, the lobotomy. The lobotomy was developed by Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz, who was inspired by tales of a violent monkey that had become docile following the removal of its frontal lobe.
- He theorised the frontal lobe was the source for mental illness, so cut it out of his human patients. The surgeries were a success – relatively speaking – and lobotomies became widespread. Moniz even received the Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1949.
- In the US, Dr Walter Freeman made a lucrative business out of driving around the country in his ‘lobotomobile’, providing on-the-spot lobotomies to anyone who wanted them. Sometimes this was schizophrenics, other times bored housewives.
- Dr Freeman’s barbaric technique involved inserting an ice pick into the eye socket and swirling it around to ‘disable’ the frontal lobe. Because his surgical technique was dangerously imprecise and his equipment was unsterile, Freeman was basically a drive-by serial killer.
- Fortunately the lobotomy faded into medical obscurity and modern-day brain surgery is a lot safer.
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