Strange Medicine

Metrazol was a drug used mostly on mentally ill people because it induced seizures and doctors thought that if done repeatedly over time it would eventually "reset" the brain and make the mentally ill person normal again. Needless to say, that didn't happen, they just had seizures.
 
Thalidomide. I saw the most victims of this in East Germany. Several people a day, I think that's a lot.
 

My mother had several miscarriages between me and my next sister, so was put on diethylstilbesterol during her pregnancy. Years later, female DES babies as they were called, had a higher level of certain types of women's cancer and a higher chance of having premature babies. The drug was stopped in 1970 or so.

My sister never developed cancer (she died at 65 from being hit by a drunk driver) but her only child was born two months premature but was healthy and suffered no long-term effects, thank goodness.

A friend told me that her father worked sometime in the 1930's in a large state hospital for the criminally insane on an experiment that involved treating syphilis patients by giving them yellow fever to see if an extremely high body temperature would kill the syphilis. It didn't kill the syphilis but it sure killed a lot of the patients.
 
Botox is a particular form of the botulinum toxin which is found in soil, dust and contaminated food. It works by attacking the nervous system causing paralysis in those exposed. In order for muscles to move, neuron communication must occur.

Do you know what? I'm going to have Botox injected into my face so that I can look younger.
 
While we may think of energy drinks as a new trend, they have existed for almost a century. And if you think they were a lot healthier back in the day than they are now, you're mistaken. The energy drinks sold in the 1920s did not contain huge amounts of caffeine and taurine, as they do now, but instead, they contained real energy—radium. One of the most infamous examples is RadiThor, which was simply radium dissolved in water. Unsurprisingly, the drink was created by a Harvard dropout, William J. A. Bailey, who was not a medical doctor. RadiThor was advertised as "A Cure for the Living Dead" and "Perpetual Sunshine."
 
Captopril, sold under the brand name Capoten among others, is an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor used for the treatment of hypertension and some types of congestive heart failure. Captopril is made from the venom of the Jararaca pit viper snake.

What always surprises me is who was the first to think? "I'm going to let that poisonous snake bite me, it could help my hypertension"
 
This thread points out the fact that we humans don't REALLY understand the human body (or anything else in nature, for that matter), but we just barge on ahead, damn the torpedos, and develop stuff to use for various applications without regard for what the side effects might be. This is not only true for medicine, but instead in all fields of endeavor. Only in hindsight can we look back and see the damage caused by some of these developments. 20 or 30 years from now people will have similar discussions about some of the things developed and in use today.

Tony
 
Cocaine was often used on the gums of teething babies and paregoric which is like liquid morphine was used for diarrhea. I had a great aunt who was addicted to the paregoric.
 


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