Evolving Medical Practices: From Obsolete to Modern

There are a lot of medical procedures that we used in the past that is now gone for good because they were either unethical or didn't have a positive effect for what they were treated against. Thanks to modern medicine, we are not going to be using those medical procedures anytime soon, and in this post I will look at a few medical procedures that have lost their relevance, and I will also mention one that we are using currently which might not be in use in the future of medicine.

The first medical procedure I will like to look at is one used to treat mental health problem. Doctors then will use Lobotomy which has to do with tearing the brain to treat patients who were feeling depressed, anxious, and serious headache. It was believed that tearing the brain could sever the nerve stands that connects the frontal lobe to the thalamus helping patients with mental illness recover. The practice was done for every case that has to do with the head. Lobotomy is still done till date but for vert rare conditions unlike in the past when it was done for anything and everything that has to do with the head.

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In the 17th century, doctors usually advice corpse medicine where people would eat corpses as medicine. The believe was that if a person had a problem with a particular part of their body, they will eat the same part from the remains of another person. People even sold blood mixture and while this method isn't good, it can even lead to poisoning from eating decayed infected flesh.

You will be so surprised at the extent that Doctors have gone with believing in so many wrong things in the name of medicine. One of them is doctors believing that milk is a substitute for blood. In the 19th century, doctors didn't have enough idea on how to store blood, so they believed that milk could substitute for blood because they contained many nutrient and would turn to white blood cells to fight infection.

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One very disturbing one is using malaria to treat syphilis. I didn't know that we need a disease to treat another and while it might sound funny to you, it was sometime used in the medical word. It is known as malariatherapy and it works. It was an idea by Julius Wagner-Jauregg where malaria was used to treat syphilis. The fever from the malaria would be use to treat the syphilis, after which a malaria drug would be given to the patient after the syphilis has been cured. This method was used for decades until penicillin was discovered.

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Did you know that at one point in time, Heroin was used as a pain relieve, to treat cold, as well as other conditions such as cancer, bronchitis, tuberculosis, depression, sluggishness, and old age. In 1906, the American Medical Association approved heroine as a medication to treat these diseases.

Have you heard of that at one point, people would blow smoke from tobacco into people's rectum to save them after drowning. it was believed that blowing smoke into the rectum so they can be hot from inside out helping to dry them from the water they must have consumed. It was later believed that it can treat lots of diseases but in general, they were all false proving to be dangerous to both the patients and the doctors.

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Today we still perform some medical practices that I guess would be looked into the future and possibly stopped. For now, we are still not having problems with this types of treatments and procedures but they might soon go into extinction, and an example of such procedures is Colonoscopy. It is used to identify early colon cancer and it is a very good but soon, the process of inserting camera through the rectum to the colon will soon be seen as inhumane and something that shouldn't be practiced because there would be new technology to identify this cancer without putting camera through the anus.

Reflecting on these outdated medical practices, it's crucial to appreciate the advancements in modern medicine that have paved the way for safer, more effective treatments. The evolution of medical practices reminds us of the ongoing pursuit of knowledge and the commitment to providing better healthcare for all.

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^{https://www.jstor.org/stable/25272667
https://www.iflscience.com/nineteenth-century-doctors-used-milk-for-blood-transfusions-67580
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2022.2058175
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/what-is-a-lobotomy
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3640229/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24185088/
https://collegeofphysicians.org/programs/education-blog/corpse-medicine/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3281739
https://bcmj.org/special-feature/special-feature-tobacco-smoke-enemas
https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine
https://www.resuscitationjournal.com}