Heroic medicine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heroic medicine is a term for aggressive medical practices or methods of treatment, and usually refers to those which were later superseded by scientific advances.

It is not known who first used the pejorative term “heroic medicine”; but it is most likely that it was first used by US or British scholars of the history of medicine in the early years of the twentieth century.

Heroic medicine, in which the patient, rather than the physician (or the therapy) was heroic, flourished between the 1780s and 1850s. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), who signed the American Declaration of Independence, and is considered to be one of the “fathers" of American medicine, and who had trained in medicine at Edinburgh University (1766-1768), was a strong advocate of “heroic medicine” ^[1] .

During the Age of Heroic Medicine (1780-1850), educated professional physicians aggressively practiced "heroic medicine," including bloodletting (venesection), intestinal purging (calomel), vomiting (tartar emetic), profuse sweating (diaphoretics) and blistering. Physicians originally treated diseases like syphilis with salves made from mercury. These medical treatments were well-intentioned, and often well-accepted by the medical community, but were actually harmful to the patient.

The death of George Washington, on December 14, 1799, may have partially resulted from shock from blood-letting.

Today, the term is used by some alternative healers for any aggressive conventional medical practice or method of treatment that they perceive as making people suffer, get sick, get weak and run down and/or die. Some alternative healers have called chemotherapy and radiation therapy "the heroic medicine of the modern era", because it might have severe side effects, including, ironically, cancer.

Physicians do not dispute that conventional medicine such as surgery sometimes causes side effects despite delivering benefits to patients. Doctors continually have to resolve such ethical questions, often keeping in mind the principle primum non nocere (meaning: first, do no harm). But they stress that while alternative medicine such as homeopathy has no side effects whatsoever, there is also no evidence of benefits to patients greater than placebo.