Origins of the Medication Model
for Pain Treatment
In 1900 the average age of death for men and women was 47 ± a year. Until the late 19th century, medicine had a poor record, relying on bloodletting and other treatments that often caused more harm than help. In fact, the practice of surgery was established on battlefields where the “surgeons” who accompanied armies doubled as barbers. The barbershop of today retains the battlefield symbol of a pole wrapped with bloody bandages, which originally served to mark battlefield hospitals.
However, with Robert Koch's discovery that bacteria caused disease, in the last 20 years of the 1800's, the causes of diseases such as anthrax, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, diphtheria, tetanus, syphilis, typhoid, and typhus were discovered. This remarkable era continued with Louis Pasteur's refinement of vaccination, and by 1890 scientists were developing antitoxins and compounds to treat diphtheria and syphilis. In 1853 the wonder drug aspirin was first synthesized and it was used so frequently that hospitals and clinics became accustomed to dispensing medication for pain.
The grand coup came with Alexander Fleming's accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928, which, along with Sulfa drugs, which came on the scene in the 1930s, revolutionized the practice of medicine for the purpose of “curing” disease. Over roughly a 50-year period the causes of dozens of diseases were being discovered, and even more miraculously they were being “cured” with antibiotics. The scientific and drug revolution was underway, and we are still under the influence of drug-oriented medical treatment model.
Read on for a History of Opioids in the next section.