Blooming Wellness
Dr. Eek's Health & Wellness Blog
One of the strangest chapters in medical history involves a treatment that sounds completely backwards today. People once smoked cigarettes to relieve asthma symptoms. View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) Before modern rescue inhalers, “asthma cigarettes” were sold in pharmacies and prescribed by physicians. They weren’t ordinary tobacco cigarettes. Instead, …
America has always had a love affair with celebrating freedom through controlled explosions. Today, we mostly worry about fireworks causing burns or sending someone to the emergency room. Some people will lose fingers, cuz they just don’t listen or they’re too drunk to listen. But around the turn of the 20th century, doctors feared something …
In the late 1800s, cocaine wasn’t just legal, it was found in a variety of medicines. One of the more surprising examples was cocaine toothache drops, which were sold over the counter to relieve dental pain. Watch my reel here: View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) The reason they worked …
And then there was…the Pop Rocks Myth. In the late 1970s, parents across America became convinced that mixing Pop Rocks candy and soda could make a child’s stomach explode. The rumor became so widespread that it even claimed “Little Mikey,” the boy from the popular Life cereal commercials, had died after eating Pop Rocks and …
Public Health is Weird… View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) If you think debates over masks are something new, history has other ideas. A long time ago, before COVID, there was a lot of fighting over the 1918 flu pandemics masks. During the 1918 pandemic, several U.S. cities required people …
Welcome to Public Health Is Weird—a series where I dig up some of history’s strangest (but true) public health stories. This one is about shoe store x-rays. Watch the Reel View this post on Instagram A post shared by EeKs (@doctoreeks) When X-Rays Became a Shoe Shopping Experience Imagine walking into a shoe store, slipping …
Imagine it’s a few weeks before Thanksgiving. The turkey is thawing. The relatives are coming. The cranberry sauce is ready. Then the federal government announces that some cranberries may contain a chemical linked to cancer in laboratory animals. Welcome to the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959. It’s one of the strangest food safety stories in …
For decades, smoking on airplanes was completely normal. Passengers lit cigarettes during flights. Ashtrays were built into armrests. Flight attendants worked entire shifts surrounded by secondhand smoke. And perhaps most bizarrely, airlines often designated separate “smoking” and “non-smoking” sections—as if tobacco smoke politely stopped at Row 18 and refused to travel any farther. Welcome to …
Listen on Causes or Cures: Are poinsettias poisonous? Every December, poinsettias reappear and so does the panic. Someone gifts a beautiful red plant, and suddenly the room fills with warnings about poisoned pets, sick kids, and emergency vet visits. I grew up in a house with lots of animals. Anytime someone brought home a poinsettia …
Copyrighted: Dr. Eeks (Erinkate Stair, MD, MPH) On Causes or Cures: Listen now: Click here to listen to “Truth Serum” from my Causes or Cures website, Apple, Spotify, etc. Disclaimer: Entertainment only. I am not a public health historian. I am a gremlin who reads too much and asks weird questions. The Hook: Once upon …
