Bad Practices You Thought Were Good For You! – Radioactive Drinks, Tapeworms And More

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Over the course of history, there have been many products that were, at the time, supposed to be good for you. In this piece, created by the guys over at Grey Haze, we’ll show you just how terrible some of these supposed treatments were for you.

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Bad Practices That Were Not Good For You

We start off with Radioactive Drinks. Radioactive drinks were prescribed by doctors to those who just generally felt under the weather. Thanks to these drinks, they weren’t going to be feeling better anytime soon, as the radioactive element of the drink would cause the patient to have nausea, diarrhoea, a fever and terrible headaches.

Next up we have Tapeworms. These were advertised towards women who wanted to lose weight. The theory was that the worms would feed on whatever the person would eat, and therefore half the amount ingested, preventing weight gain. Unfortunately, the tapeworm would instead feed on all the key vitamins that the body needs and thus cause the patient to have constipation, bloating, nausea, diarrhoea headaches and severe abdominal pain. Lovely.

Unbelievably, cartilage taken from a shark was supposed to prevent and/or cure cancer. The unbelievable part of this wasn’t necessarily that it didn’t work, but that it was use up to as late as the 90’s. Initially shark cartilage was used because people thought that sharks couldn’t get cancer. It turns out, after extensive research, they can. Patients who tried this treatment suffered from low blood sugar, high calcium levels, fatigue, dizziness, low blood pressure, and that’s only naming around half of the symptoms.

“Fancy some heroin?” You wouldn’t hear that today if you went into the doctor’s complaining of a sore throat, but back in the early 1900s you did. In fact, it was quite common for a doctor to give you heroin, but instead of curing sore throats and coughs, it actually, as we all know now, was incredibly addictive and the patients couldn’t get enough of it.

The same happened when doctors in the mid to late 1800s would give you cocaine for pretty much any reason you could come up with. Pain, fever, you name it, cocaine was the cure. And while it didn’t physical cure anything, it made the patients not care anymore.

And finally, we have tobacco. In the 15th Century, this was used for not only smoking pleasure, but as a disinfectant too. People also believed that it would relieve headaches, colds and ward off disease and fatigue but all it actually did was to be addictive and cause cancer. However, nowadays we have a smoking alternative which is healthier, such as e-cigarettes.

Bad Practices You Thought Were Good For You

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