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Revoiting
Old treatments might make you
squeamish, but they worked.
RUTH LITTMANN STAFF WRITER
here's something
graphic and utterly
gross about medical
treatments of yore.
Take leeches, mag-
gots and cod liver oil.
"Some of those old-fashioned
treatments were excellent, but
disgusting," says Dr. Sander
Kushner, chairman of family
practice at Sinai Hospital.
Modern doctoring, though it
can be equally unnerving,
generally sounds too high-
tech to nauseate. Travase and
Elase, for instance. Such med-
ications, used for dissolving
necrotic tissue, cleverly hide be-
hind unassuming white cream
and scientific names — totally
Greek to the layman.
"It's all debridement, remov-
ing dead stuff, basically," says Dr.
Peter Aronson, assistant profes-
sor in the department of derma-
tology at Wayne State University
School of Medicine.
Medical-ese. With all the con-
fusion it wreaks, highfalutin
terms might keep a few stomachs
from turning. Not so with the
frank terminology and all-nat-
ural cures of yesteryear.
Leeches are seg-
mented worms that
typically inhabit fresh
water and damp trop-
ical forests. They at-
tach themselves to
flesh and suck blood with their
strong, suction-cup mouths.
Historically, the medicinal
leech, Hirudo medicinalis, was
used for "bleeding," a process by
which excess blood was released
from the body. If a person fell,
bruised himself and developed a
blood clot, leeches were attached
to the sore.
They also helped patients with
congestive heart failure. Weak-
ened hearts can't pump blood ef-
ficiently and fluid often builds up
in the lungs.
In olden days — dating back
past medieval times — people
with congestive heart failure
came to the doctor for frequent
leechings. They'd lie down on a
table and the physician would
put the brown, flat, noodle-like
critters all over their bodies and
they'd "get leeched," Dr. Kushn-
er says.
Highfalutin terms
keep stomachs from
turning.
The leeches would consume
enough blood to grow up to six
times their initial body weight.
Pulling the leeches off would re-
lease a popping sound. Then, doc-
tors would store them in a box for
the next patient.
`The leeches would go from pa-
tient to patient. Of course, that
would create other problems, like
hepatitis, but nobody knew about
issues like that in those days," he
says.
Although most contemporary
doctors prescribe diuretics for flu-
id retention, leeches are coming
back into vogue for other reasons.
One big plus: Leech saliva con-
tains hirudin, a valuable antico-
agulant and anesthetic for blood
thinning and pain relief.
'There are scores of examples
like this. Often, something ob-
served through traditional use
has turned out to have an actu-
al, current-day clinical use," says
Dr. Paul Werner, chairman of
family medicine at WSU School
of Medicine.
Maggots, soft-bod-
ied white fly larvae,
eat away at dead an-
nual tissue but spare
the healthy flesh.
Studies in the 1930s revealed
that a patient's neglected and in-
fected broken bones healed bet-
ter when blowfly maggots
infested the wounds.
It was an accident. No one in-
tended for the tiny insects to feast
on the injured fellow. But, lucky
for him, the mistake proved
healthful. Without pus and
necrotic tissue, the good flesh is
less vulnerable to infection and
repairs better.
"The maggots clean out all the
garbage and leave a fresh surface
of vital tissue," says Dr. Werner.
"The trouble was, in the good old
days, the maggots weren't ster-
ile and they might have been in-
troduced by a fly from the
garbage heap."
Today, doctors generally use
surgical equipment to cut away
dead and infected tissue, or
they apply a sterile enzyme so-
lution to liquify the contamina-
tion. Saline rinses it all away.
Maggots are used when all else
fails.
Cod liver oil. Plug
your nose and swal-
low. This slippery
elixir comes from the
fresh livers of cod
fish. In the past, it was used as a
dietary supplement of vitamins
A and D. Babies with rickets, a
vitamin deficiency, were pre-
scribed the slimy syrup. People
with 'constipation used it as a
cathartic.
In addition to smelling foul
and tasting even worse, the oil
easily becomes rancid when ex-
posed to light and oxygen. An-
other disadvantage: Too much
vitamin A can cause liver prob-
lems and cataracts. An overdose
of vitamin D can lead to kidney
damage and other maladies by
disrupting the metabolism of cal-
cium and leaving deposits in
weird places throughout the
body.
The New Englanders of early
America banked on cod liver oil,
but pills substitute for it today.
They're easier to swallow and
serve to modulate people's in-
take of the necessary,
but potentially dan-
gerous, vitamins A
and D.
Prunes, oat bran,
Metamucil. What's
in today? Correctol. What's out?
Cod liver oil — by far.
But, 100 years from now,
chronically constipated Ameri-
cans just might look back in
shock at the lengths to which
their 20th-century ancestors
went to relieve themselves. Milk
of Magnesia?
Torture.
Maybe, in the year 2095, we'll
have discovered some totally
unanticipated virtues of maggots.
Consider a savory flavor of cod
liver oil, enhanced with chocolate
and raspberry extract. Heck, it
all boils down to what works.
Right?
Wrong.
Let's face it, what'll really
count in the next 100 years is
whether insurance will cover the
leeches.
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