actres in bikini

While we can never fully come to terms with the throes and devastations we are dealt by the natural world, that doesn’t stop us from trying to mount a saddle on the very worst of it. Along the way to a closer understanding of virtual infinity, there have been stubborn and idealistic, if not necessary, shots in the dark with the hopes of an eventual hit, a glimpse of enlightenment.

Conversion Therapy


Championed by conservatives and conservative-minded people, conversion theory is anything but a joke, that is actually valid as a school of medical thought. Also known as the “gay cure,” this treatment is alleged to reverse the onset of homosexuality as if it were a kind of disability or acquired trait. A big gray area in psychological study, homosexuality has been probed for ages, by both Freud and his daughter Anna, and hasn’t come up with any valid conclusiveness that can be pinpointed under a microscope. Obviously controversial, the therapy has resulted in pulverized self-esteem/worth and the occasional chance of suicide. After all, what can be expected when a child is told something he can’t control is “not right” with him. What comes to mind is Nazi scientists measuring Jewishness against intelligence level: xenophobia is a terrible inspiration for scientific research.

Insulin Shock Therapy


One of several controversial forms of “shock therapy” which involve, essentially, shocking a patient’s system into making a desirable change. Oftentimes such procedures apply to schizophrenics and those with severe cases of mental illness. With this particular example a patient is administered gradually increased doses of insulin until they seize and sink into a several day coma. The thinking is that some kind of normalization will lie on the other side of the coma, when more likely it’s just death. Here we have another “Try Anything” treatment that feigns to be medical science, and not just a bunch of intrusive tinkering, the likes of which aren’t unlike kicking a TV to get it to work right.

Human/Animal Testing


While such is necessary as an ultimate step, going straight from hypothesis to dissection is wildly reckless, not to mention inhumane. This fact wasn’t learned without making some mistakes along the way: in testing the effectiveness the first polio vaccine, human subjects were used with little to no discrepancy. Few were able to live to tell about it. Now precautions are observed with great fastidiousness and humans are only called in when certainty is closely realized. The fact remains that animals are often used as a human substitute, which is no less cruel if you believe in animal rights. There are alternatives to animal testing, championed by most activist groups, such as plants and bacteria, lifeforms that don’t feel pain, where the only sacrifice is timeliness.

Cocaine


The ultimate painkiller, cocaine used to be prescribed for a variety of mundane ailments, ranging from depression to headaches, and was naturally the best sought way to make all bad feelings turn to good ones. That was before it became illegal, or any kind of official evaluation or prolonged study turned out any possible negative effect of treating the stuff like aspirin, such as the addictive qualities, possibilities of overdose, and psychological/cardiological detriments. Freud himself had more than a bad habit, which explained all his vivid dreams, and saw no reason his patients couldn’t benefit themselves from his favorite nose candy. While it may have lost its favor in medical science, it maintained its popularity in nightclubs straight into the eighties.

Barber-Surgeons


You may notice whenever you go to get a haircut by some lost-in-time WWII vet who really loves baseball, something that looks like a slice of a giant candy cane marking the door. What you may not realize is the origin of such a universal staple which goes back to when haircuts and major surgery shared a common denominator: the barber-surgeon. The red and white striping hails directly from the bloody bandages which said hack-artist would drape around a pole. Thankfully barbers these days only operate with a pair of hair clippers and the occasional lollipop.

Blood-Letting


Blood-letting stems back to an ancient Greek tradition, where in which blood would be drained from an afflicted individual in order to balance the bodily “humors” which were thought to be the determining factors of one’s health. This practice was kept up in medieval Europe as barber-surgeons would drain blood to rid toxins.

Radiated Water


Before radium was seen as a radioactive health hazard, even while it’s used as a form of cancer treatment, it was inserted into water and marketed as a possible fountain of youth. (There was also a time when smoking was thought good for you.) It was suggested that it provided an undefinable “spark of life” when consumed, a death-defying miracle treatment of sorts. It was even put into toothpaste and other household goods. We still sell extremely dangerous substances(i.e. any not-yet-recalled prescription drug) under the pretense that it’ll make life so much better, that is assuming it doesn’t kill you.

Leeches


Even while leeches are still used to this day, it’s not often you go to the doctor complaining of a sore throat and he pulls out a juicy leech as a remedy. Barber-surgeons relied on this natural blood-letter to fix virtually every medieval ailment, thinking it could drain all impurities in a really good suck session. While it sounds barbaric, leeches do have true medical merit; they are used in some kinds of reconstructive surgery to prevent clotting, as the leeches produce a special anti-coagulant enzyme (called hirudin) in their saliva for that very purpose.

“Rest Cure”


Pioneered by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell in the latter half of the 19th century, this controversial treatment was prescribed mostly to women who were seen as “hysterical.” The treatment called for a virtual surrendering of autonomy of women seen as some generic form of “not well.” Resting, in these terms, meant no reading, movement, talking, or imagination of any sort. As such, women striving for empowerment were rightfully taken aback by such medical suggestion (e.g. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” which emphasizes the mad tyranny in perpetually being told to stay in bed by a better-knowing man).

Peg Legs


Peg legs were the prosthetic limb of choice for pirates and Civil War-era amputees who wanted to get their hobble on. A crude hunk of wood fastened to the remaining leg-matter, a peg leg was an option for upright mobility that today is a lot better than was the case a few hundred years ago: nowadays artificial legs and prosthetics allow the legless to run in Olympic-caliber strides, and move about without looking distinctly “parrot less.”

The history of medicine is filled with stories of strange tonics, outlandish remedies, and curious "cures." While some of these disgusting medical practices do work, some don’t, they’re still used as a measure to treat certain diseases.

Smoking


For centuries doctors prescribed smoking for a variety of ills and while this does still happen (though the doctor’s generally don’t want it publicized) the numbers of doctors who do this has become extremely small. Research with regard to neurological diseases, evidence suggests that the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease might be 50% lower in smokers, compared to non-smokers.

Nicotine has also been found to improve ADHD symptoms and appears to have effects in the brain that are similar to those of stimulants. Although such findings should certainly not encourage anyone to smoke, some studies are focusing on benefits of nicotine therapy in adults with ADHD. Recent studies suggest that smokers require less frequent repeated revascularization after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Risk of ulcerative colitis has been frequently shown to be reduced by smokers on a dose-dependent basis; the effect is eliminated if the individual stops smoking.

Fecal Bacteriotherapy


Fecal bacteriotherapy is used in the treatment of certain inflammatory bowel disorders such as ulcerative colitis. The treatment comes in form of a series of enemas given to the patient over a five day period. In order to create the liquid used in the enema, a “poop donor” is needed. In other words, a sample of poop is taken from a healthy person (usually a relative of the patient) and turned into a liquid for anal insertion. The idea is that the healthy bacteria from the poop provider will grow in the sick person and heal them. What is perhaps even more revolting than an enema of someone else’s poop, is the fact that the liquid can also be delivered via a tube in the nose.

Helminthic Therapy


Helminthic therapy, a type of Immunotherapy, is the treatment of autoimmune diseases and immune disorders by means of deliberate infestation with parasitic worms (helminths) or their eggs. This is such a cure-all that it is also occasionally used in the treatment of hay fever and asthma. Depending on the particular autoimmune disease in question, infection with helminths can result in remission of symptoms in as high as approximately 70% of patients. The worms are administered via oral doses which are taken repeatedly over a course of weeks and can result in some fairly severe side-effects. Some patients can receive up to eight doses of 2500 worm eggs over the course of their treatment.

Leech Therapy


Medicinal leeches are now making a comeback in microsurgery. They provide an effective means to reduce blood coagulation, relieve venous pressure from pooling blood, and in reconstructive surgery to stimulate circulation in reattachment operations for organs with critical blood flow, such as eye lids, fingers, and ears. The therapeutic effect is not from the blood taken in the meal, but from the continued and steady bleeding from the wound left after the leech has detached.

The most common complication from leech treatment is prolonged bleeding, which can easily be treated, although allergic reactions and bacterial infections may also occur. Devices called “mechanical leeches” have been developed which dispense heparin and perform the same function as medicinal leeches, but they are not yet commercially available.

Bloodletting


Bloodletting is the withdrawal of often considerable quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. It was the most common medical practice performed by doctors from antiquity up to the late 19th century, a time span of almost 2,000 years. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the historical use of bloodletting was harmful to patients. But, bloodletting has not died a death – it is still one of the most effective treatments of excess iron in the bloodstream and for treatment of excess red blood cells which can occur in diseases such as porphyria. In the old method, the patient was cut and a suction cup was placed over the wound to draw out blood. In modern times syringes are used.

Urine Therapy


The term urine therapy (also urotherapy, urinotherapy or uropathy) refers to various applications of human urine for medicinal or cosmetic purposes, including drinking of one’s own urine and massaging one’s skin with one’s own urine. A practitioner of urine therapy is sometimes called a psychopath. Just kidding, they are actually called uropaths. There is no scientific evidence of a therapeutic use for urine. Urinating on jellyfish stings is a common folk remedy, but has no beneficial effect and may be counterproductive, as it can activate nematocysts remaining at the site of the sting.

Urine does contain substances that are beneficial, such as Vitamin C; however, these substances have been excreted because they could not be used or because they were present in excess, so re-taking them will just result in re-excretion. The most obvious physiological effect of drinking urine, at least when it is taken on an empty stomach, is bowel movement (sometimes in the form of diarrhea) due to the laxative action of hypertonic solution of urea.

Dousing


Dousing is the practice of making something or someone wet by throwing liquid over them, e.g., by pouring water, generally cold, over oneself. Cold water dousing is used to “shock” the body into a kind of fever. The body’s reaction is similar to the mammalian diving reflex or possibly temperature biofeedback. Several meditative and awareness techniques seem to share similar effects with elevated temperature, such as Tummo.

Compare cold water dousing with ice swimming. The effects of dousing are usually more intense and longer lasting than just a cold shower. Ending a shower with cold water is an old naturopathic tradition. There are those who believe that this fever is helpful in killing harmful bacteria and leaving the hardier beneficial bacteria in the body. Steam may be seen to rise off of the body, especially when dousing in wintertime.

Electrocution


Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also known as electroshock, is a well-established, albeit controversial, psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment for severe major depression which has not responded to other treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania (often in bipolar disorder), catatonia and schizophrenia.

It was first introduced in the 1930s and gained widespread use as a form of treatment in the 1940s and 1950s; today, an estimated 1 million people worldwide receive ECT every year, usually in a course of 6–12 treatments administered 2 or 3 times a week. Most, but not all, published reviews of the literature have concluded that ECT is effective in the treatment of depression.

Mud


We are all familiar with the use of clay in health resorts where people bathe in it to improve skin conditions, but what many people don’t know is that clay (or mud) is also used in internal medicines. It is sometimes used as a coating on pills but it is also consumed in larger doses for the treatment of bowel disorders. Even NASA uses clay treatments: “The effects of weightlessness on human body were studied by NASA back in the 1960s.

Experiments demonstrated that weightlessness leads to a rapid bone depletion, so various remedies were sought to counter that. A number of pharmaceutical companies were asked to develop calcium supplements, but apparently none of them were as effective as clay. The special clay that was used in this case was Terramin, a reddish clay found in California. Dr. Benjamin Ershoff of the California Polytechnic Institute demonstrated that the consumption of clay counters the effects of weightlessness.”

Sweat Therapy


Sweat therapy is the combination of group counseling/psychotherapy with group sweating. Group sweating is social interaction while experiencing psychophysiological responses to heat exposure. Group sweating has strong cultural validity as it has existed throughout the world for thousands of years to promote well-being.

Examples include the Finnish Sauna, the Russian Banya (sauna), the American Indian Sweat lodge Ceremony, the Islamic Hammam, the Japanese Mushi-Buro or Sentō, and the African Sifutu. Group sweating has been used for various physical and mental purposes for thousands of years. It has been asserted that the potential health benefits of regular participation in Native American sweat lodges are numerous, but that there is a scarcity of research about the practice.