Bloodletting: Why doctors used to bleed their patients for health.

ISLAMABAD -- Bloodletting - the practice of withdrawing blood from a person's veins for therapeutic reasons - was common for thousands of years. In this Curiosities of Medical History feature, we look at the history of bloodletting and how it eventually fell out of favor with the medical community. Also known as phlebotomy - from the Greek words phlebos, meaning 'vein,' and temnein, meaning 'to cut' - bloodletting is a therapeutic practice that started in antiquity. Today, however, the term

phlebotomy refers to the drawing of blood for transfusions or blood tests. Some sources suggest that the original practice of bloodletting is more than 3,000 years old and that the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans - as well as many other ancient peoples - all used it for medical treatment. Hippocrates - an Ancient Greek physician who lived in the fifth century before the common era and was one of the...

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