The Strangest Products Ever Sold For Pain Relief Purposes

There is a broad range of pain relief products available in pharmacies up and down the country, which range in strength from suitable to help with newborns in pain up to highly powerful painkillers for helping with intense levels of chronic pain.

Typically the most common pain relievers sold are non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen and aspirin, as well as paracetamol, which relieves pain but does not reduce inflammation but otherwise is used in a similar way.

The health and pain relief characteristics of these medications are well understood, which puts them in stark contrast to pain relievers used in the past.

A lot of painkillers used before the rise of NSAIDs are not only bizarre, but some have such dangerous side effects that they have since been made illegal.

Cigarettes

Given that tobacco is one of the biggest causes of death in the UK, connected to countless serious and potentially fatal diseases, it can strike many people as somewhat odd that at one point children were encouraged to smoke for the good of their health.

Whilst many of the claims are laughable, the concept that Lucky Strike cigarettes could protect against throat irritation and cough might be one of the most ludicrous of all.

Part of the reason for these adverts was the result of doctors who were already addicted to cigarettes and thus had a sense of confirmation bias.

Ultimately, the evidence of how cigarettes cause cancer became inescapable and adverts that claimed cigarettes are harmless, let alone beneficial became outlawed.

Soothing Syrup

When a baby’s first set of teeth come through, it can be a very painful and uncomfortable experience, and typically the best solution is comforting and using a teething ring that can be cooled to help soothe the gums, with paracetamol and ibuprofen both options for babies after three months in small doses.

By contrast, one product that was sold to help with teething pain was Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, which contained a mix of morphine and alcohol that was so potent it was ten times the recommended dose of laudanum even at the time.

The syrup was very popular, but it also quickly garnered the nickname “baby killer” as some babies would take the recommended dosage (three or four teaspoons a day) and simply never wake up.

Mrs Winslow’s brand was denounced by the American Medical Association, which ultimately would lead to the winding down of the soothing syrup after its ridiculous active ingredients were removed.

Heroin

Given that heroin is considered to be one of the most dangerous drugs in the world, and one that has a long list of horrifying side effects, it can be shocking to discover that at one point it was sold to children as a safe alternative to another medicine.

In the late 1880s, morphine and opioid dependence concerned a lot of people, so Bayer developed an alternative known as diamorphine but later given the brand name heroin.

Claimed to be less addictive and five times more effective, it was marketed heavily towards children, which cultivated a huge number of addicts before it was banned in the 1920s.