Some ancient health treatments are still used today including some that haven’t fundamentally changed much since their ancient introduction.
Thousands of years ago, our ancestors developed healthy habits and rituals based on their observations of nature. Wellbeing meant a close connection to the earth, staying in tune with the body, and living in harmony with the environment.
There’s no question that modern medicine helps us live longer and improves our quality of life. But that doesn’t mean we can’t overlook the healing traditions of the past.
Medicine is rapidly evolving: new drugs, new devices and new techniques are constantly introduced to improve patient care. And yet, despite these many innovative advances, there are some mainstays of modern medicine that are thousands of years old and have withstood the test of time.
These are everyday remedies that you probably encounter all the time without being fully aware of their longstanding history.
Aspirin
Way back in Ancient Greece, Hippocrates may have told his patients: “Take two pieces of willow bark and call me in the morning.” And he was right to do so. The bark of the willow tree contains one of the oldest medicinal remedies in human history. In its modern form, we call it aspirin.
More than 3,500 years ago, the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians used willow bark as a traditional medicine for pain relief. Centuries later, its benefits were advocated by Hippocrates in Greece and Pliny the Elder in Ancient Rome. But it wasn’t until the mid-1800s that scientists refined willow bark into the medicinal compound salicin. And it wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that scientists at Bayer turned salicin into acetylsalicylic acid, which they dubbed aspirin (“the wonder drug that works wonders”).
Today, aspirin is perhaps the most commonly used drug in the world. It’s the focus of 700 to 1,000 clinical studies each year, with applications beyond its traditional uses as an analgesic and antipyretic. It’s now prescribed to prevent secondary heart attacks and strokes and has shown promise for reducing the risk of certain types of cancer.
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Cataract Surgery
If you think that the eyes were too valuable and fragile for the Ancients to cut into, you’d be wrong. In the 6th century BC, good old’ Sushruta of India documented the standard cataract surgical procedure called couching. This involves poking a sharp or blunt instrument into the eye to dislodge the cataract, where it falls into the eye’s anterior chamber, out of the patient’s line of vision. Amazingly, couching was the only method of cataract removal until as recently as the mid-18th century—and it’s still practiced in remote parts of the world today.
As an alternative to couching, French surgeon Jaques Daviel introduced extracapsular cataract surgery in 1748. In the early 20th century, Irish ophthalmic surgeon Henry Smith popularized the intracapsular technique, which freed the lens capsule from the attached zonules. But it wasn’t until World War II that ophthalmologist Harold Ridley invented a way to replace the eye’s natural lens with an artificial one. Dr. Ridley, serving as a military surgeon, noticed that shards of the windshield material from fighter planes didn’t cause the expected foreign body reaction when lodged in patients’ eyes. Using this material (a polymethylmethacrylate/glass hybrid), he invented the first intraocular lens. But it was another three or four decades before the idea really took hold.
In the late 1960s, ophthalmologist Charles Kelman introduced phacoemulsification—a method that uses ultrasound energy to break apart the hardened cataract. Today, modern cataract surgery continues to improve with the use of femtosecond laser for more precise and safer surgery.
Cauterization
This was first described by the Greek physician Hippocrates as burning a part of the body using heat. Dr. William Bovie changed that in 1920 by inventing electrosurgery, which uses an electrical current instead of heat to cut tissue or coagulate blood, which stops bleeding. The tool is referred to as the Bovie after its inventor and is an invaluable tool that is used in a plethora of surgical procedures.
Caesarian sections, or C-sections, have been performed for thousands of years. In fact, it was Ancient Roman law that a pregnant female who was dying or dead have a mandatory C-section to remove the fetus. Prior to this law, both the mother and fetus died, but once the law was introduced, there was a chance for the fetus to survive. Contrary to popular belief, the term C-section is probably not named after Julius Caesar, because his mother survived childbirth and therefore would not have been a candidate for a C-section. Instead, one of Caesar’s relatives may have had a C-section, which led to the confusion over the origin of the procedure’s name. Still, C-sections are commonly performed.
These medical practices may be ancient, but they are still used today because they are tried and true. It seems that ancient methods aren’t so ancient after all.
