Crazy Health Fads From The Past
Taking better care of ourselves is a must as we approach our Golden Years. But what is the right thing to do? We hear about different diets all the time, but which one is actually good for us? We hear about different foods or concoctions, this month everyone jumps on the bandwagon, next month it’s on to the next crazy fad.
Well, I took a look back and came up with a few doozies, some crazy fads from the past that were supposed to be the find of the century, but now are long forgotten and I thank God that they are. Here is a list of some of those crazy health fads from the past.
Drinking Urine
Reports dating back to ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt suggest that urine therapy has been used to treat everything from acne to cancer. There was a time when doctors tested for diabetes in urine by taste.
There’s no scientific evidence to support claims that drinking urine is beneficial. On the contrary, research suggests that drinking urine can introduce bacteria, toxins, and other harmful substances into your bloodstream. It can even place undue stress on your kidneys.
Believe it or not, there are still some people out there that drink urine. YUK
Arsenic Consumption For Weight Loss
As crazy as this may sound, people actually would mix arsenic in their coffee to help them lose weight. It was marketed as a weight loss diet miracle around the world in the 1920s.
People began ingesting arsenic in their coffee as a weight-loss method. They would put small amounts in their morning cup of coffee and increase it over a period of a few weeks until diarrhea set in. Once their poop began to run, they would slowly decrease the dosage and enjoy the benefits of not being able to keep anything solid in their bodies. Sure, they would lose weight, but they were also poisoning themselves.
Vibrating belt machine
In the not-too-distant-past (as in, the 1960s,) when many people believed that fat could be lost by simply rubbing it away. Women across the country would wrap a vibrating band around their “problem areas” and set to vibrate. A large belt would vibrate several thousand times per minute, promising to trim down the size of your waist. Now I remember this first hand because my mother had one of these vibrating belt machines when I was a kid.
Of course, it never worked to burn off fat, but my brother and sisters had a lot of fun playing with it.
Coffee Enemas
I don’t think I have to explain how this is performed. This is something that started in the early 1900s, it is supposed to be a treatment for the following health issues:
In addition, coffee enemas are often used to boost mood, reduce stress, increase energy levels, improve digestion, and promote sounder sleep.
There is research that debunks that, Coffee enemas may also lead to several serious complications, such as dehydration, pleural or pericardial effusions, infections, sepsis, salmonella, colitis, rectal or internal burns, perforation of the wall of the intestines, electrolyte imbalance, brain abscess, heart failure, and even death.
The Sleeping Beauty diet
Now, this has to be the wackiest diet I have heard of so far. If you like being awake for only 4-5 hours a day this might be for you. The object is to take sleeping pills in order to sleep 19-20 hours a day. The theory is if you are sleeping all that time you won’t be eating and if you are not eating you will be losing weight.
Using sedatives to trigger weight loss, essentially by sleeping through parts of the day when you might otherwise be eating meals is unhealthy and downright dangerous. There’s virtually no part of mental or physical health from mood to cognition to immunity to cardiovascular health that isn’t put at risk by attempting this diet.
Icepick to the Brain
How to cure the mentally ill? Remove their ‘extra emotions’ by cutting out a piece of their brains. Like trepanation, lobotomies were once performed by drilling a hole into the head, but psychiatrist Water Freeman quickly ‘improved’ the procedure by switching to a faster icepick-through-the-eye-socket method. Performed after rendering the patient unconscious via electric shock, it took only ten minutes, but the results varied wildly, from the successful to the tragic. Its usage declined as effective antipsychotic drugs became available in the 1960s.
Radioactive drinks
In the early 1900s, people believed that radioactivity was good for you. Radioactive items were sold including radium pendants for rheumatism, uranium blankets for arthritis, anti-aging radioactive cosmetics, radioactive water, and more.
Thinking radiation was natural in the water, radioactive drinks were marketed to the public. Eben Byers, a well-known industrialist, claimed to drink three bottles a day. His death inspired the 1932 Wall Street Journal headline “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off“.
Believe it or not things like coffee enemas and sleeping beauty diet are still used by some people, I guess it takes all kinds. Desperate people do foolish things, don’t be one of them.
