The 13 Craziest Things Ever Used As Medicine (In America)

Everyone is extremely familiar with anti-smoking ads, but what about smoking for your health ads?


That's right, when cigarettes were first invented they were thought to improve your health. That ad says that Lucky brand cigarettes protect your throat from irritants and coughing. Over 20,000 doctors backed up that claim, that's way better than the normal 1 out of 5 ratio we get nowadays.

Cigarettes are were thought to calm a cough, open your lungs, even help cure asthma. But no medical treatment is complete without a celebrity endorsement and cigarettes of course had them. Everyone from Joan Crawford to Jack Nicholson will tell you that smoking is just fine. 50's television shows were littered with commercials and stars puffing away. But the first and most elite endorsement came from French novelist Marcel Proust. Proust wrote to his mother in 1901:

"Yesterday after I wrote to you I had an attack of asthma and incessant running at the nose, which obliged me to walk all doubled up and light anti-asthma cigarettes at every tobacconist’s I passed, etc. And what’s worse, I haven’t been able to go to bed till midnight, after endless fumigations, and it’s three or four hours after a real summer attack, an unheard of thing for me."


Anti-asthma cigarettes...not for children under six but go ahead and give them to a seven year old! It's good for their growing lungs!



This guy must be a huge health freak. 

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Urine is considered a viable medical treatment in several countries, according to Healthonline.com the therapy is based on the belief that urine is a by-product of blood filtration. Blood filled with nutrients passes through the liver and toxins are excreted through solid waste. Purified blood travels to the kidneys where extra nutrients are eliminated from the body. Urine consists of urea which is an antifungal, antibacterial and antiviral agent.



Urine therapy is believed to treat a number of conditions such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis and eczema. That means instead of prescription lotion to rub on your dry skin you can just dab some urine on it.



So say goodbye to all of those long hours waiting at the pharmacy paying enormous amounts of money to insurance companies. This is a homegrown therapy where you take your pharmacy (bladder) with you. But you may still be forced to wait in a few lines when it comes to refills.





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Bleeding or Bloodletting was a treatment used in ancient times to either to treat or cure aliments. The thought was that the blood was tainted and if you drained small quantities you would let out the "bad blood".



See, the theory was that the body was filled with four fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile) called humours and that any imbalance in the four was the reason you were ill.



Today if you're ill you can't even give your blood away donations will send you away. When you go to the doctor they take an enormousness amount to test to find the disease that's floating about in your cells, so maybe there was something to this theory.

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This product is the single most amazing product that I found in my research. It was said to be "indispensable aid to mothers and child-care workers". This little concoction was considered a medicinal product invented by Mrs. Charlotte N. Winslow and first marketed by her son-in-law Jeremiah Curtis and Benjamin A. Perkins in Bangor, Maine, USA in 1849.

They marketed this product in recipe books, women's magazines, anywhere they could get mothers to see it. It claimed to cure everything. Toothache, stomach ache, colic, you name it and this "soothing syrup" fixed it.



Want to know what was in this amazing syrup? Well, one grain (65 mg) of morphine per fluid ounce, cannabis, heroin, powdered opium which are the active ingredients to put your little one to sleep. It also had sodium carbonate, spirits foeniculi, and aqua ammonia in it, because....why not?


The product was removed from the market in 1938, that's 89 years of service.

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Mercury was commonly used to treat a whole host of aliments, heal wounds, and prolong life. Now we know that mercury actually shortens life, causes aliments, and unless you're wolverine does very little to heal anything at all.



Mercury was used in fillings for cavities until it was discovered that having mercury in your body slowly poison's and causes toxins to go into your bloodstream. Now people go through the process of "demercurfing" their mouths and replacing them with "white fillings".
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