Emily Flores
History often reminds us how quickly everyday norms can shift, and medicine is no exception. Practices once trusted as the best solutions can appear strikingly unfamiliar when revisited decades later. Just fifty years ago, doctors relied on treatments shaped by the knowledge of their time—approaches that no longer align with today’s understanding. Here are 10 medical practices from that era that might feel unusual now.
Bloodletting For High Blood Pressure
It’s striking to realize that as late as the 1970s, medicine still leaned on bloodletting to treat hypertension. The logic was deceptively simple: reduce volume, ease pressure. Patients suffered dizziness, yet the practice was wrapped in clinical authority. In fact, phlebotomy kits remained standard equipment in many clinics of the time.
Radiation For Acne
For dermatologists of the mid-20th century, X-rays seemed like a sleek solution. By targeting sebaceous glands, acne could be reduced without messy creams. The rationale stood firm until research unraveled it. Only later did everyone uncover the cost: radiation left patients with lasting damage, from skin disorders to cancer.
Lobotomies For Mental Illness
Few treatments illustrate the tension between desperation and science quite like the lobotomy. In some countries, these surgeries continued into the 1970s and severed frontal lobe connections in an attempt to calm patients. Yes, people emerged docile but profoundly impaired. Depression, schizophrenia, and other conditions were the usual targets of this invasive “cure.”
Mercury-Based Treatments
The element mercury once found a place in medicine. Through the mid-20th century, doctors prescribed it for ulcers and infections. Toxicity was downplayed, despite evidence of kidney and brain damage. Only when safer drugs took hold did this practice disappear.
Smoking For Stress Relief
A physician’s advice to light a cigarette feels almost unthinkable today, but it was part of ordinary medical culture just decades ago. Cigarette advertisements proudly displayed doctors endorsing their use. They framed smoking as calming and appetite-suppressing. Later, undeniable evidence tied this habit to heart disease and reshaped public health entirely.
Insulin Coma Therapy
Psychiatry of the past often leaned on dramatic interventions, and insulin coma therapy was among the most extreme. Administered widely through the 1960s and 70s, it relied on artificially induced comas to “reset” the mind. Patients endured high risks, but the method reflected the medical hopes of its era.
Thorazine For Everyday Anxiety
Look back just a few decades, and Thorazine sits at the center of an expanding pharmaceutical aspect. Once intended for serious mental illness, it found new life in treating everyday tension. Its side effects (tremors, fatigue, lethargy) were often downplayed, as both doctors and patients leaned on its promise of calm.
Tapeworm Diet Pills
For someone desperate to lose weight, the idea might have seemed irresistible: take a pill, get a slimmer body. Instead, tapeworms caused malnutrition and illness, which left patients weaker rather than healthier. Even so, these pills persisted, marketed as effortless solutions at a time when quick fixes held strong appeal.
Routine Tonsil Removal
A child with healthy tonsils sometimes still finds themselves on the operating table. Tonsillectomies were performed as a preventive measure, assumed to ward off future throat infections. Risks of bleeding and infection were overlooked, and many surgeries were unnecessary. Still, parents believed it was simply part of growing up.
DES Prescriptions During Pregnancy
DES mimicked estrogen. In the womb, a developing girl’s cervix, vagina, and uterus are shaped by estrogen signals. When DES was added artificially, it disrupted this process. That’s why female fetuses faced rare vaginal and cervical cancers, along with fertility problems. Boys were also affected, but didn’t show the same cancer pattern.