As some of you know I suffer from chronic pain due to a severe back injury. Needless to say it is a topic that comes up way too often in my life. I was talking to a friend yesterday and he mentioned how “lucky” I was to be living in this century as I would have been really screwed a hundred years ago. I gave it some thought and concluded that he was 100% correct. Then I started thinking about the following:
1: Was there even a treatment for back injuries a hundred years ago? Today’s treatment options are still quite barbaric (slicing you open and picking out the disc, replacing it with bone shavings) and produce not very reliable results. Was surgery an option then and if so what was done?
2: Pain management. I have read that hardcore opioids were available “over the counter”, but is that accurate? Were there available drugs to keep the pain at bay or did you just suffer? I suppose you could have tried to drink the pain away.
3: Was there any kind of Social safety net? Today we have Social Security Disability, but what about then? I suppose your family could take care of you if you couldn’t work, but what if you didn’t have family?
I guess I am lucky to be living in this day and age. Medical science isn’t advanced enough yet for a cure, but all things considered life could be much worse.
I don’t have the same medical problems that you have, but if I lived 100 years ago, I’d be dead by now.
Perhaps I should rephrase that: The medications that are literally keeping me alive didn’t exist 100 years ago. Not only am I lucky to live when I do, I’m also lucky to live where I do.
Opium, not its alkaloids, was the essential ingredient in the innumerable remedies dispensed in Europe and America for the treatment of diarrhea, dysentery, asthma, rheumatism, diabetes, malaria, cholera, fevers, bronchitis, insomnia, and pains of any sort. At a time when the physician’s cabinet was almost bare of alternative drugs, it was impossible to practice medicine without it.
For decades opium and related substances, such as laudanum, found wide acceptance, and it was used with often fatal results to calm infants in that form of Victorian day care known as baby farms. According to Anthony S. Wohl, malnutrition rather than overdose killed children: the opiates reduced their appetites so drastically that they refused to eat.
I would be dead just thirty years ago. Twenty years ago my prognosis would not have looked good. Today I’m in better shape than I was five years before the cancer. In my lifetime the state of the art has gone from certain death two years ago. To six months of treatments and two ongoing years of recovery To be in better shape than I was even three years ago.
My sciatica was completely cured, four years ago, with just physical therapy, which my doctor agreed (at my suggestion) to try, instead of steroids and surgery. There are many cures that are not invasive.
I doubt if any surgeries were much fun before anesthetics,
Families just assumed, as a natural obligation, that they would take care of any family member that needed health care attention. Old people died in the back bedroom of their sons and daughters, even into the 1950s.
Depending on where you live, surgery might be an option, but not an advisable one. The risk of infection would be enormous, making surgery not a smart option for anything that isn’t likely to kill you immediately.
Opiates and alcohol would be your pain relief options. It wasn’t unusual for people with pain disorders to develop strong opium addictions.
Social programs would be severely limited, although you may find some help through the church if you are truly destitute. That said, your family would almost certainly step up to the bat. A “family” back in the day would most likely be large and multigenerational, and include a collection of working people, children, the elderly and the sick. Everyone would pitch in what they could. You might be able to help make handicrafts, or watch the kids, or even just do sedentary food preparation tasks. Anyway, i t would be very rare, especially outside of the cities, for someone not to have a family at all to stay with.
Prior to anesthetic surgery was not an option unless your back pain was caused by a foreign body lodged in your body, and even then it was extremely iffy. A lot of people walked around in chronic pain.
You basically had opium and stuff like chiropractic.
Yes, opium was OTC for much of history. That, and alcohol, were the main painkillers.
If you didn’t have family you were probably screwed unless you could get some church to take you in. Social safety net was pretty much family, maybe friends.
Surgery was rare and hit and miss (and without anasthetics, as mentioned above). Other than pain-numbing drugs like opium, there was not a lot you could do. Walk with a cane, I guess.
On the plus side, with a body so badly stressed, I suppose you would have died early from one of inumerable bacterial diseases floating around, due to stress that compromised your immune system; instead of having to endure decades of regular pain… Assuming you were wealthy enough to afford food if your pain kept you from working hard enough to earn the penny a day for a loaf of bread.
What was that quote about life being “nasty, brutish and short…”?
I was just reading a book and they mentioned around 1780 that a lot of medical procedures did more harm than good. So you might have been better off back then if you had no access to a doctor.
Considering that until about 1990 it was believed stomach ulcers were a result of stress and worry; until someone discovered that simple antibiotics fixed the problem - I would not be surprised to discover that the same applies to some back pain.
If only you could have been my doctor teen years ago! I’ve learned to take everything a surgeon says with a skeptic attitude. Surgeons cut, it’s all they seem to know how to do. I don’t think they can see any other options except cut and sew. Unfortunately medical science hasn’t advanced enough yet to provide a patient with a really informed opinion on the outcome of a proposed surgery. My surgeon was a great cheerleader for all of the possible good outcomes, he wasn’t so good about disclosing the possible bad. There are just too many variables to say you will be this % back to normal after I get done scrapping the squishy bits out of your spine.
In the end, it was my decision and my fault for being so trusting of a man in a white coat in a fancy office. I should have done more research.
Even WITH modern anesthetics, surgeries are not really fun today. They are just a lot less painful.
Sterile technique and modern nursing techniques are GOOD things. Even if a doctor/surgeon/barber did everything right, if you got an infection, you had a big, big problem.
Yes, I HAVE been reading a lot about Florence Nightingale lately. She was amazing.
The thing is, if a doctor prescribes medication or lifestyle changes, the outcome depends in a large part on how well the patient will comply. If a doctor tells a patient to stop smoking and get more exercise, but the patient refuses to do so, there’s not a hell of a lot that the doctor can do about it. Even if the patient complies precisely with instructions, improvement in health might take weeks or months or years. On the other hand, if the doctor cuts something, then s/he knows that the treatment is DONE, and in most cases, the change is almost immediate.
Some doctors are really knife happy, especially if they are surgeons. I’m sorry that you had one that was so eager to cut without explaining all the risks. Nowadays it seems to me that every time I so much as have a tooth pulled, I have to be counseled on every risk factor there is…possibly because of cases like yours.
