10 of the Weirdest Medical Cures Throughout History

HEROIN

Opioids like morphine and codeine are among the oldest therapeutic and recreational drugs known to man, predating recorded history by hundreds of years. But during the late 18th century Western scientists were beginning to realize that the addictive qualities of these medicines often outweighed their usefulness as painkillers.

Supervisors at Aktiengesellschaft Farbenfabriken (later the gigantic Bayer pharmaceutical corporation) hoped to find a less dangerous opiate by acetylating morphine in 1897, resulting in a compound that researchers labeled "heroin" for its apparent "heroic" effects on test patients.

Unfortunately for Bayer and for generations of popular musicians, heroin turned out to be the exact opposite of what they wanted. It metabolized much faster than morphine, was twice as potent as morphine, and was in almost every way easier to market as a recreational drug than its chemical antecedent.

Heroin resulted in some of the United States' earliest narcotics laws, predating even the Prohibition. It remains as a modern health crisis as well as the foundation of some of the best Velvet Underground songs.

CUPPING

Cupping was one of the very first examples of Chinese alternative medicine that made the transition to Western medical practice, first appearing in the writings of Hippocrates in 400 BCE.

Basic cupping involves creating a vacuum or low-pressure area within a glass cup (usually with a small fire) and then clapping the cup onto the patient's flesh, creating a disfiguring bruise scientifically referred to as a "hickey" but without the fun of making out with somebody.

Cupping practices vary between "dry" cupping (just the hickey effect) and "wet" cupping (where the vacuum cup is applied to a minor incision, drawing out more blood than usual) but neither technique has ever been shown to produce effects better than a placebo.

Because science and reason have never been that popular as a way to determine public policy, cupping continues to be popular in the Third World.

LOBOTOMY/LEUCOTOMY

If you were starting to think that all these weird and barbaric medical practices were restricted to ancient societies outside of Europe, please consider the early history of psychosurgery, where subtle mental disorders were "treated" by an icepick to the frontal lobes of the brain.

Beginning in 1935, lobotomies (occasionally referred to as leucotomies) were a significant part of national-level health initiatives that also employed eugenics and sterilization as part of a horrifically misguided and frequently racist attempt to improve the genetic stock of the human gene pool.

Even though the supposed benefits of lobotomy were never proven, the popular support of this hideous surgical technique was so powerful that Portuguese surgeon Antonio Egas Moniz, founder of the lobotomy technique, was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1949.

MALARIA AS A MIRACLE CURE

During the early 20th century, medical scientists were still trying to put together different pieces of human physiology, and in many cases they thought that they had figured out the human body when they had actually just determined vague relationships between different parts of the body.

One of the most popular examples of this half-baked scientific tradition was the idea of "pyrotherapy," where a high fever was regarded as a universally positive example of the human body successfully repelling disease.

There's some merit to this idea and it is related to the beginnings of immunology, but scientists and doctors like Nobelian Nazi Julius Wagner-Jauregg insisted that infernal fevers were the foundation of any good treatment of disease, willfully ignorant of the many scientific immunological advances that had been made during World War II.

Even today "malaria treatments" are regarded as miracle cures by medical celebrities as renowned as Dr. Henry Heimlich, who claims without any supporting evidence that "malariotherapy" strengthens the immune system to such an extent that it can resist the AIDS virus.

ELECTROTHERAPEUTICS

On their face, electrotherapeutics and similar electricity-based mental treatments are fairly logical answers to mental disorders. After all, neurological problems are ultimately the result of bad mental wiring, right?

As it turns out, neurological disorders can't be solved by just swapping a couple of neurons around, and the brute-force approach to neurological rewiring tended to damage more brains than it cured.

After years of dedicated and misguided research, it was determined that ECT and similarly traumatic electroshock treatments were at least as damaging as lobotomies and resulted in even worse impaired patients.

THE TAPEWORM DIET

Often cited as an urban legend, stories of desperate women deliberately ingesting tapeworm eggs in order to keep off those pesky may have some basis in fact. several mail-order companies in the early twentieth century advertised tapeworm heads or eggs as weight and appetite suppressants, but patent medicine at the time was completely unregulated and full of frauds, raising the disturbing possibility that instead of parasite eggs and body parts you would be ingesting something that wouldn't slowly eat your intestines at all.

Supposedly jockeys were particularly fond of the tapeworm treatment, but no medical record has been found to support this theory and given the many dangerous side effects of a tapeworm infestation it's more likely than not that anybody using the worms would be visiting a hospital early and often. Nevertheless, a 2009 episode of "The Tyra Banks Show" featured several guests who admitted they were still willing to eat worms in the pursuit of physical beauty.

COLLOIDAL SILVER

Silver has mild antibiotic properties and is generally non-toxic, so it was occasionally used in the early 20th century in dressing and preparing wounds. But as more effective antibiotics and dressings came into being, medical silver became less and less common.

Then in the early nineties there was a sudden inexplicable resurgence in colloidal silver's popularity in the alternative medicine community, and what had once been a minor antibiotic and hygienic aid was now being touted as anything from a vital dietary supplement to a cancer cure.

Like many alternative medicines, colloidal silver had no immediate adverse effect (or positive effect) on its users, but after enough time swilling the metal something unexpected happened: people began to change color, ranging from pale grey to a surprisingly dark blue.

Silver isn't easily passed and tends to accumulate in the body over time, resulting in a condition called argyria that was previously only seen in silver miners. Amazingly, many argyria sufferers continued to use and advocate colloidal silver treatments, arguing that while their appearance may seem unusually Smurfy they are otherwise perfectly healthy.

MAGNETS

As a great poet once remarked, "F-kin' magnets, how do they work?" The science surrounding magnetism is sufficiently abstract and confusing that people can make nearly any claim about a magnet's capability and if they make it sound scientific enough people will believe them.

Naturally, the alternative medicine movement was drawn to magnets like iron filings to some sort of attractive force, with many quacks using the fact that hemoglobin is weakly paramagnetic to argue that covering yourself in expensive magnets in various configurations would improve blood flow and vascular health.

While electromagnets of a particular size and strength can have a minor effect on hemoglobin, the energies and field strengths involved are way beyond what you can buy out of SkyMall-which is fortunate, since if blood was magnetic in the way magnet therapists claim, you would explode every time you went in for an MRI scan.