In this video, Mikhail Varshavski, DO -- who goes by "Dr. Mike" on social media -- reviews antiquated medical practices.
Following is a partial transcript of the video (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 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? 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. 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, 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? 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. 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 . 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 sickening and painful. 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 super soldiers. 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 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.
, is a board-certified family physician and social media influencer with more than 10 million subscribers.