CAM vs the Middle Ages

I finally finished Toni Mount’s ‘Medieval Medicine.’ It’s a worthwhile read if you are interested in Leech Books and the like.

It also highlighted a few things for me about the intersection of modern CAM, modern medicine, and old medical practices.

Translating Ancient Wisdom

When someone says that something was used in the past, you want to check out the details.

For instance, betony was used for everything head-related, pain relief, good ol’ hysteria, heart palpitations, and neuralgia. Today, it is, at most, used for migraines and as a ‘nerve tonic.’ Why the discrepancy?

It probably didn’t work for 99% of the things it was tried on, but placebo effects and familiarity kept it in the mix long after testing narrowed its uses down to the one or two things it actually did.

We may be reintroducing maggots and leeches in medical practices, but it’s in a controlled environment with a lot of testing beforehand. Or at least I hope it is. It shouldn’t be the same thing as ordering maggots off the internet and declaring them a cure-all while dumping them on everyone within reach.

Weird, What Gets Dropped

There are a terrifying number of ‘cures’ that have a physician gut and boil live puppies, patients drink pig poop in wine, or something equally awful.

Amazing how ‘ancient wisdom’ advocates drop those medicines from their herbals.

I bet if you put some pig dung in a petri dish, it would have some antimicrobial effect. That is the level of evidence we have for continuing to use a lot of supplements and medicines that we find more to our liking, so why aren’t pig leavings touted as a cure for labor pains anymore?

Ok, I’m being mean. We all know that most of the advertising that cites old recipes using a particular plant comes from someone scouring the internet for ‘evidence’ of something they already ‘know’ to be true. Nobody wants puppy-murder to be medicine, so no one is going to look for evidence that it works.

Also, just to be clear, don’t boil puppies or drink sow feces in wine. They are bad ideas.

Similarities

The humoral theory meant there was a huge emphasis on diet as a cure for anything that ailed you. Plenty of CAM proponents take this view too and like to point out that diet is a part of conventional treatments as well.

However, diet doesn’t cure absolutely every single thing ever. Just some, very specific, things.

It’s a matter of emphasis.

A Reminder

They got far more right than some folks realize: eye-glasses made of rock crystal or glass first appeared in the late 1200’s, surgery for things such as harelips could be performed, a shocking number of soldiers survived amputations as far back as the 1100s, and quarantining often worked.

Wound care was pretty good until some Galen fanboy got a bee in his bonnet about encouraging puss. Midwives could turn a breech baby, and battlefield surgery made some cool advancements.

Our ancestors had the same brains we do, and there are people today promoting drinking your own urine as a cure for everything. So…some food for thought there.