Medicine in the past

[hadeeryaser2002]

People have always had headaches. They are common health problem that people have all over the world. In some cultures people use special herbs. For example, Native American Indians use plants which contain a chemical found in aspirins. But today, most people in the developed world take a tablet to treat a headache - aspirin, for example. In the past, however, people didn't use to have tablets, so what did they use to do?


Many years ago, headaches were treated in all kinds of ways - and some of the treatments might be hard for us to believe in the twenty-first century!Thousands of years ago, for example, medicine men used to make holes in the heads of people with headache, because they believed this would let the headache out. This may seem very cruel to us, but in those days people believed this treatment ould make their headache go away.


In ancient Egypt, medicine men had different way of treating headaches. They used to tie a ceramic crocodile, which was filled with herbs, to the hesd of the patient. The reasons for this are not clear to us today.


In the Middle Ages, there were no hospitals and only people who were rich could afford to go to doctors. But the people that did go to doctors were usually treated with leeches - small, black creatures that suck blood. They were put on the patient's body near the place where the pain was. For people who had headaches, the leech was usually put on the neck.


These treatments were probably quite painful, and they may seem very strange to us now. Just imagine what dentists used to do to people tht had toothache