I keep thinking “I’m going to run out of ludicrous medical treatments to write about one day.”
Today I found out that they used to use ping pong balls in treating tuberculosis. Today is not that day.
Today’s Moment of Science… Plombage.
Tuberculosis (TB) has been around fucking up lungs since, give or take, the existence of lungs and fucking up. Though the bacteria can settle into other parts of the body (known as extrapulmonary TB), it almost invariably makes a snack out of the windbags. Symptoms commonly include a phlegmy, sometimes bloody cough, fever, chills and fatigue. It presents with appetite loss and subsequent weight loss, giving the disease the apt title ‘consumption’ while it seemingly eats away at its victims.
Nearly half of patients died from TB before modern treatments, but even with access to every antibiotic on the planet today, tuberculosis can still be lethal. There’s a long and horrifying discussion to be had about things like the surprisingly high number of asymptomatic carriers and the ongoing crisis of multiple-drug resistant TB, but today… ping pong balls.
In the not so recent past, we were awe inspiringly bad at medicine. In the twentieth century alone, our grandmothers were cleaning house while hopped up on amphetamines, the lobotomy scored a nobel prize, and you could order Bayer Heroin from a Sears catalog.
So it’s perhaps not too surprising that when trying to get a lung to fix itself in the pre-antibiotic era, someone suggested, “I dunno, break it more?”
The idea was that if you caused the part of the lung that looked about as healthy as pre-used kitty litter to collapse, it could heal faster. This was accomplished by creating a cavity inside the ribs and stuffing it like a goddamned Thanksgiving turkey with your choice of materials. This could include paraffin wax, lucite balls, gauze, rubber sheets, inert oils, ping pong balls, and other things also found in my goodie drawer.
Which I can’t imagine made suffering through TB feel any less like utter fucking garbage.
It’s hard to find information on how frequently the results were beneficial from this. There are scattered case studies from doctors in the 1950s talking about how well the procedure worked, but interestingly they said how well it worked along with all the antibiotics they loaded their patient up with for surgery. In one report a doctor said they thought the procedure would work better if they gave their patients more antibiotics.
The fifties were a different time. A dumber time.
Long term complications could appear a half century after the procedure, especially since the material was typically not removed. Complications including hemorrhaging, the formation of fistulas, and jesus fucking christ, obviously there were infections.
At some point dousing patients with a firehose worth of antibiotics became the preferred treatment, as it was both easier and more effective than sewing marbles, goose feathers, and a live gerbil into their bones.
Currently the strategy for managing tuberculosis includes the BCG vaccination for children in high-risk parts of the world, combination therapy with antibiotics, and surgery for severe cases. It’s estimated that as high as a quarter of the world’s population is carrying latent TB infections, with one in ten latent infections likely to become symptomatic.
This has been your Moment of Science, just as horrified as you, I swear.
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