Bogus medicine

oxford mushroom SG

Over the years, all sorts of claims have been made for treatment of various medical illnesses. Alot of them are bogus and a number were probably more harmful than the illness they are meant to treat.

What sort of bogus medicine are you aware of or have you been a victim yourself?

oxford mushroom SG

To start the ball rolling, phlebotomy or letting blood was used as a form of treatment for diverse ailments. One form of blood letting is to attach leeches to the body or hold a heated cup over a cut in the skin to create a vacuum to alloe blood to flow more easily. Blood letting is practised not just by physicians but barbers too. The red and white stripes on a pole outside a barber shop was a symbol of blood letting: red for the blood and white for the bandages..

ndmmxiaomayi SG

But was told by teachers it helps. It doesn't help?

thinkdifferent SG

Frontal cortex lobotomy through the eye socket. I think in the 50s one doc used this for patients with schizophrenia and other disorders. Many of the patients suffered brain damage or died due to bleeding in the brain after this.

cornyfish2000 SG

How about the old treatment for tuberculosis (TB)..

Before the first anti-TB antibiotic streptomycin was discovered, the commonly practiced treatment then was to crush the nerve supplying the diaphragm (phrenic n.), thus causing the affected lung to collapse.

Not sure if this can be considered 'bogus', cos it was the logical and widely accepted solution then, though it may sound really outlandish and ridiculous now.

cornyfish2000 SG

Actually venesection is still an accepted form of management now, for conditions like polycythemia.

oxford mushroom SG

Not for the conditions they were supposed to treat...a cure-all according to the medieval physicians. Phlebotomy is still used for hereditary haemochromatosis but there are hardly any other useful indications...

oxford mushroom SG

For urgent treatment, yes, but it is not a cure...polycythaemia rubra vera is a chronic myeloproliferative disease and treatment of the underlying neoplasm may be required.

oxford mushroom SG

Ya...those days they thought the frontal lobes have no function. The patients are left in a catatonic state as a result..

oxford mushroom SG

There is a (vaguely reasonable) explanation for this treatment. As you know, Mycobacterium tuberculosis requires oxygen to thrive. That is why the upper lobes of the lungs (best ventilated areas) are more susceptible to TB and are the first sites of involvement usually. By collapsing the lung, you create an oxygen-poor environment which is supposed to kill the bacteria. In practice they tend to stay dormant and may pass the infection to others. But without effective antibiotics I guess they did not have much of a choice. Incidentally, my grandmother was among the first patients to receive streptomycin from missonary doctors in China. It left her with deafness but she was cured from tuberculosis.

oxford mushroom SG

Mercury was quite commonly used as a medication (still exists in some traditional Chinese and Indian medicines) but of course it is toxic. It was also used in industry to soften the felt used to make hats and quite often the workers developed psychiatric symptoms. Now you know the basis of the saying, "Mad as a hatter".

Do you know that doctors used to treat syphilis with mercury? That is also the basis of another saying, which I think is quite cute:

"One night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury."