Bloodletting Is Still Happening, Despite Centuries of Harm
In the shadow of India’s largest mosque, the gutters run red with blood.
It’s a bizarre scene, if you’ve never seen a modern-day bloodletting. First, men wrap patients’ arms and legs with straps as tourniquets, to control the blood flow. Then they use razor blades to make tiny pricks in the hands and feet, and blood trickles into a concrete trough stained red with the day’s work.
The bleeding people look pretty happy, though. After all, they’ve paid for the service. They come to be cured of everything from arthritis to cancer.
(Video: Meet the bloodletters of Delhi and their patients.)
But why? How has the bloodletting business, which many doctors today would rank along with reading bumps on the head as olde timey quackery, managed not to dry up?
The appeal seems to be in its simple logic.
Muhammad Gayas runs his bloodletting business in the garden of the Jama Masjid mosque in Old Delhi. He says pain and illness happen “when the blood goes bad,” which is pretty much the same basic premise that bloodletters have sold the public since Hippocrates
Bloodletting has been practiced around the world even longer than that, tracing at least 3,000 years ago to the Egyptians. It remained an obsession among many Western doctors through the 19th century, and was still a recommended treatment for pneumonia microsurgery
So Does Bloodletting Ever Work?
It may be helpful for people with a few particular blood abnormalities. Doctors still use bloodletting, for instance, in cases of polycythemia—an abnormally high red blood cell count—and in a hereditary disease called hemochromatosis, which leaves too much iron in the blood.
I also came across a preliminary study small study in BMC Medicine
But the design of that study doesn’t rule out a placebo effect—which has certainly contributed to bloodletting’s popularity in the past. What’s more, other studies suggest that too little iron is bad for cardiovascular health, so again, the potential benefit of removing blood is unclear.
Meanwhile, depleting the body’s blood supply can be risky. Not only is there the risk of losing too much blood, causing a dangerous drop in blood pressure and even cardiac arrest, but people who are already sick take their chances with infection or anemia. Not to mention that in most cases, bloodletting doesn’t cure what ails you.
So no, we don’t need to revive the tradition of the neighborhood bloodletter. In a sense, though, their legacy is still around: Red-and-white barber poles represent blood, bandages, and the stick that patients would grip during barbers’ days as bloodletters.
How Bloodletting Bled Out
It took the great bloodletting wars of the 1800s to begin turning the tide against the practice. The prominent doctor Benjamin Rush (a signer of the Declaration of Independence) set off a fury when he began bleeding people dry during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. By all accounts, Rush was a bloodletting fanatic and in general a real piece of work
Rush recommended that up to 80 percent of his patients’ blood be removed, and during the yellow fever outbreak, North recounts that “so much blood was spilled in the front yard that the site became malodorous and buzzed with flies.”
Bloodletting’s detractors grew in numbers after that, and eventually Pierre Louis, the founder of medical statistics, began convincing doctors
In fact, one history of bloodletting
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