10. Honey
Honey is a plant nectar that has been modified by bees (bees); honey has long been praised not only as food but also as a medicine. The ancient Egyptians mentioned honey no less than 500 times in their medical literature and added honey to more than 900 remedies to treat a variety of diseases. When European soldiers suffered sword wounds or other weapon wounds in battle, doctors often applied honey to the wounds to promote healing and prevent infection. The Assyrians, Chinese, Greeks and Romans all relied on this product for the same purpose.
Treating wounds with this sweet substance may sound stupid, but modern scientists have discovered that the ancients had already discovered something. Experiments have shown that honey has an extremely powerful antibacterial effect, it can kill wound bacteria in less than two days on average; in some cases, honey is applied, and after about ten hours, it can destroy bacteria - such a effect can be comparable to modern antibiotics. Honey drains water from bacterial cells, causing bacteria to die because they cannot reproduce; honey also contains glucose oxidase, which is secreted by bees, which is not only a powerful natural fungicide, but also a mild antibiotic.
A recent German study found that honey is effective in stopping the aggravation of infection symptoms in pediatric cancer patients. Therefore, the study sponsors suggest that doctors should try honey when treating wounds that are difficult to heal.
9. Bloodletting therapy
When honey didn't work, the ancient Egyptians used bloodletting therapy to treat patients with severe infections. This therapy is based on the medical theory that the human body contains four fluids, or four "bodily fluids," namely blood, sputum, black bile, and yellow bile. (Based on this, we use terms like "bile" and "mucus" to describe several personality traits in people.) At that time, it was widely believed that in order for a person to be healthy, these four fluids must be balanced; the infection was not caused by microorganisms—which no one knew at the time—but by an overdose of blood.
Sometimes, doctors perform bloodletting by making an incision in a patient's vein or artery. Or take the cup suction method. When using this method, the doctor places a hot glass upside down on the patient's skin. This creates a vacuum, causing countless capillaries to rupture and, as a result, the patient bleeds extensively subcutaneously. Sometimes, doctors also use leeches to perform bloodletting.
Although phlebotomy may sound creepy today, at the time, it may have been useful in fighting certain bacterial species, at least in the early stages of infection. Microorganisms need iron to reproduce, as long as they are isolated from red blood cells containing iron, it is difficult for invading bacteria to maintain a state of infection.
8. Maggots
In modern times, doctors will put maggots on the patient's wound and let the maggots eat the bacteria on the wound. Maggots or ants were approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) for medical use in 2004.
During the Napoleonic Wars, a surgeon noticed a peculiar phenomenon: soldiers were wounded, and after the wounds were infected with maggots—the larvae of the green-headed fly—they healed faster than those that were not infected with maggots. Although this treatment may seem disgusting, doctors then began to deliberately have maggots on the patient's body as a way to fight the inflammatory infection. However, maggot debridement, referred to as MDT, although once popular, however, during World War II, since the birth of antibiotics, debridement was quickly forgotten.
Now, the effects of antibiotics are becoming less pronounced, so doctors are once again turning their attention to maggots, which use sterile young maggots that can neither multiply nor eat live tissue. These tiny organisms mainly eat bacteria from the wound and then degrade the microbes through their digestive system. In addition to this, they secrete an enzyme. This enzyme is a natural fungicide that not only breaks down necrotic tissue, but also speeds up wound healing.
Studies have shown that maggots are particularly effective in fighting methoxybenicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and other highly resistant microorganisms. The highly resistant methoxybenicillin Staphylococcus aureus is a deadly threat in hospitals. One study showed that maggots succeeded in killing bacteria on severely infected limbs and, in 40 to 50 percent of cases, relieved of the need for amputation. Now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially recognizes maggots as medical appliances, and Medicare provides compensation for maggot treatment.
7. Mercury
Mercury is the only metal that remains liquid at standard room temperature and air pressure. In the past, people used mercury to treat syphilis, and it wasn't until later that they realized how toxic mercury was.
Since ancient times, people have been fascinated by mercury because this metal is shiny and silver and remains liquid at room temperature. Ancient Chinese believed that red mercury sulfide, a mercury compound, could help prolong life and nourish the face, while the Arabs in the Middle Ages made mercury sulfide into ointments to treat various skin diseases.
In the late fifteenth century, syphilis spread across Europe, and mercury became a trusted medicine. Symptoms of syphilis – first herpes on the genitals, then herpes grows into abscesses, emits a foul odor, and develops into ulcers, which can lead to bone necrosis, facial destruction, severe pain, sudden early death – and soon, these symptoms make people discolor when they talk about syphilis. Doctors applied mercury to the patient's skin; alternatively, they injected mercury into the patient's body, made the patient swallow the mercury, or bathed them in mercury vapor.
In fact, mercury does have some utility as a therapeutic medicine because it destroys the treponemal bacteria that cause syphilis. However, mercury does more harm to patients than it does to humans, because the metal is highly toxic, can cause damage to the kidneys, brain, and may lead to death.
6. Silver
For thousands of years, silver has been praised for its purifying effect and purifying effect. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once wrote that the Persian king drank only water contained in silver containers, because silver containers maintained the freshness of water quality. In the sixteenth century, the Swiss physicist Paracelsus began using silver to treat wounds and let patients take it orally. Other doctors follow suit. In the 1880s, German obstetrician Carl Siegmund Franz Crede began using eye drops when treating newborn babies. This eye drop contains a silver solution that protects babies from going blind from contracting gonorrheal eye inflammation. Over the next decade, a man named B.C. Cred (B.C. Krede's surgeons began using colloidal particles of silver — water suspended with silver particles — to keep the wound from infection.
The practice of using silver as an antimicrobial continued into the twentieth century. Surgeons wrap the wound with silver foil, and they usually use silver sutures to close the incision.
Although the arrival of antibiotics weakened the effects of silver, however, silver was actually an effective fungicide. Modern research has shown that silver ions destroy microbial cell membranes, punching holes in the membranes and causing more damage to the inside of microbes by binding to dna, the basic cellular component. In one test, silver wiped out 99 percent of the microbes in the sample. Although silver is generally harmless, it can also cause indigestion, convulsions, and even death when the dose is too large.
5. Cinchona bark
In the past, people used cinchona bark to make quinine, a medicine to treat malaria.
For centuries, people have used herbs to fight disease, including cinchona bark. Cinchona trees grow in the Americas, South Africa. Back in the seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries recounted how people dried the bark, ground it into powder, and stirred it in water to make a drink to quench the fever. Missionaries are likely to have obtained this prescription from the local natives, who have been using it for a long time.
This prescription is not only widely used in the folk. Cinchona bark is a raw material source for the medicinal quinine. Until the early twentieth century, quinine was the only effective medicine to treat malaria. Quinine is an alkaloid that interferes with and prevents the growth and reproduction of malaria parasites. Victims of malaria have red blood cells in their bodies parasitized by these malaria parasites. One thing that has been noted is that quinine only destroys those invaders and does not play much of a role in parasites that parasitize other cells in the victim's body. As a result, people who use quinine often get sick again after a few weeks.
During World War II, more effective treatments were developed, such as chloroquine. However, just as malaria-transmitting malaria parasites began to develop antibodies to these synthetic drugs, quinine managed to return to people's lives — the malaria parasite was still sensitive to quinine.
4. Garlic
Garlic originated in Asia and has been used as a medicinal herb for thousands of years. As early as ancient China before 2700 BC, garlic was one of the most popular treatments, and doctors used it to treat depression. In India, garlic is used to treat coughs, skin diseases, rheumatism and even hemorrhoids.
In medieval Europe, tea and tinctures were mixed with honey and garlic and used to prevent infectious diseases that could cause fever and bacterial transmission. During the outbreak of the plague of inguinal lymph node plague in the 18th century, the citizens of marseille were treated with garlic.
During an influenza outbreak in the early 20th century, doctors generally had people use garlic to prevent colds. People believed so much in the miraculous efficacy of garlic that in 1917 and 1918 the U.S. flu was prevalent, and people wore garlic necklaces around their necks in public. During World War II, the Soviet army replaced penicillin with garlic. No wonder garlic is called "Russian penicillin of Soviet Russia."
While garlic doesn't exactly have those magical features that people want, the substance allicin contained in garlic does kill a variety of bacteria, including multi-resistant E. coli strains.
3. Serum therapy
If you've ever strolled through New York's Central Park, you've probably seen a sculpture by Balto. When there was a diphtheria outbreak in Nome, Alaska, in 1925, the Siberian husky Porto risked delivering life-saving medicine to citizens. However, the medicine brought by this loyal puppy Potu is not an antibiotic, but a large amount of serum, blood products of animals such as horses, and the blood of animals will produce antibodies when they come into contact with diseases. The principle is that when the serum is injected into the human body, it will once again resist the invasion of cells.
Invented in the 1890s, serum therapy was a major discovery by Emil von Behring, for which he won the Nobel Prize.
Serum therapy has been largely replaced by antibiotics – for example, penicillin and erythromycin are now commonly used to treat diphtheria. But this philosophy is still in use. For example, when Ebola swept through West Africa in 2014, the World Health Organization considered injecting patients with serum made from the blood of cured patients.
2. Bacteriophages
In 2015, Georgian physicians Nina Chanishvili (left) and Ketino Pochidze Eliava work in the lab of the Elena Institute, which conducts phages, microbiology and virology. Phage therapy is very popular in Russia and Western Europe.
There are many drawbacks to living in the former Soviet Union, but one potential fatal drawback is the lack of antibiotics developed by Western pharmaceutical companies. To compensate for this deficiency, the Soviet Union concentrated on developing phage therapy – a virus that kills bacteria.
The idea of using viruses to kill bacteria was actually first proposed by The British bacteriologist Ernest Hankin, who wrote a book in 1896 on a certain type of bacteria that live in the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India, effectively stopping the spread of cholera. The Canadian microbiologist Felix d'Herelle demonstrated in 1915 that viruses can infect bacteria and live inside them like parasites. France and the United States began to develop drugs based on this theory, but the production of antibiotics quickly made the research lose its momentum. But in the Communist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, phage therapy became a hard-to-access alternative to antibiotics.
Recently, in view of the growing resistance to antibiotics, American scientists began to re-study phage therapy. Unlike antibiotics, which kill all viruses (both good and bad), bacteriophages kill only one strain of virus. If that virus becomes resistant to bacteriophages, it is possible for the patient to receive another mixed phage therapy.
1. Guaiac
This is another anti-infective treatment that involves the bark of the tree. Back in the 1500s, when syphilis was raging in Europe, desperate patients— or at least those who didn't yet have mercury poisoning — tried to treat syphilis with something called "guaiac resin," or "holy tree," an extract of a tree. It is native to the Caribbean and the Americas. Part of the admiration for this treatment is because it came from the New World, where Europeans believed that explorers contracted syphilis and brought them back to the other side of the ocean.
At the time, there was a theory that guaiac resin could unclog the body's excretory system and pores, allowing infected blood to purify. Patients with syphilis drink hot drinks of guaiac resin before going on to "sweating therapy."
Guaiac therapy became extremely popular because of conspiracy theories that doctors did not prescribe the drug because it might cure patients and thus reduce the physician's income. The drug became more expensive because the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V granted the import monopoly to the banks of the Fugger family. But by the 1540s, the demand for this medicine had decreased dramatically, as people began to suspect that it had no effect. They continued to use mercury until 1910, when arsenic therapy began to become a popular treatment for syphilis.
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