“Retro” Healing Techniques Make a Big Comeback
Medieval medicine not “evil” at all
In recent months, you’ve heard me laud the benefits of several medical practices that may well owe their origins to the dark ages or before – things like bloodletting (Daily Dose, 11/9/04) and maggot therapy (Daily Dose, 5/11/04). But apparently (and incredibly) it’s not just me who’s touting these tried and true healers. If certain modern trends are any indication, these “retro” healing techniques are making a big comeback. Here’s what I mean:
Last January, the FDA (in one of its rare enlightened moments), finally granted its blessings to maggots as a therapy for healing stubborn wounds – which remain a huge problem for modern medicine. For example, diabetic foot ulcers alone strike over half a million Americans and cause thousands of amputations each year. Maggot therapy might soon slash this number by 75% or more. And in another remarkable move, the millennia-behind agency approved leeches last June for clot removal and circulation issues.
What’s my point in mentioning all this? That there’s hope that the medical lessons our ancestors learned over hundreds, if not thousands, of years might not all fall prey to the arrogant assumptions of modern medicine – that if a treatment’s not drug-based or involving lasers, isotopes, and all other manner of new-fangled-ness that it isn’t worth doing. This is a way of thinking modern MDs (especially western ones) have fallen prey to en masse in the last 50 years.
However, the doctors of ancient times weren’t so stupid – quite the contrary. In fact, they often performed complex surgeries, as some evidence from the UK proves yet again. According to a BBC News report, among the 700 or more skeletons recently unearthed by archeologists near Yorkshire in Great Britain, at least one showed unmistakable evidence of cranial surgery called “trepanning,” a procedure that involved removal of portions of the skull to relieve pressure on the brain following a blunt force trauma of the type typically caused by weapons of the age (maces, battle-axes, war-hammers, etc.).
Approximately 1000 years old, the skull predates written accounts of the procedure in the region by more than a century – proving that early Anglo-Saxon healers weren’t relying on potions and spells as is commonly thought, but sound medicine (like their Greek and Roman forebears). What makes this discovery even more remarkable is that the man in question was a peasant. As such, his social standing did not permit him the resources to afford that era’s equivalent of a doctor – which means his surgery was likely performed by a fellow peasant or some type of itinerant healer. In turn, this suggests that medical knowledge was widespread enough to have been akin to an esoteric trade, and not the sole property of the aristocracy.
But I digress. I began by speaking of therapies the mainstream would, until recently, have considered somewhat “medieval” in their antiquation. And along those lines
The electrifying truth about drug-based depression treatment
It’s a running sight-gag in movies and an embarrassing skeleton the medical mainstream tries to keep hidden in its closet: Electric shock therapy. In the late Victorian era and the first part of the 20th century, as it became ever-cheaper to generate and experiment with electricity, electric shock therapy was touted as a cure for everything under the sun.
Of course, much of this was pure quackery – hucksterism of the highest order. Anyone with a hand-crank generator and a suit could tour the countryside and fleece gullible folks into paying to be shocked senseless. Funny, but all too true. However, according to some recent Wake Forest University research, properly administered electric shock therapy has real medical merits – like improving the mood, quality of life, and daily activities of severely depressed patients
And much better than antidepressants!
That’s right: ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT) helped more of the research’s subject patients (66% of them, in fact) to live with less despair and greater functionality than did the current crop of Cox-2 inhibitors, SSRIs and other antidepressant drugs. Currently, ECT is heavily restricted in the U.S and UK, but there is a growing body of support for more widespread application of the technique – much like the leeches and maggots we talked about before. But will it be abused as in the past? We will have to be very careful with this one
Again, the moral of the story’s the same: There are lessons to be learned from the “medicine” practiced in the long ago – whether it’s an herbal cure, a creepy critter bleeding us dry, or a jolt of electric shock. Not all of it was scientifically sound, of course, but SOME of it most certainly was.
To assume otherwise is the height of arrogance.
“Charging” forward by looking back,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
