Blood Letting (Phlebotomy)Therapy

There are many benefits of blood letting or donation as we always told  our blood donors every time I explain to them the benefits of giving blood that they will discover. I noticed that as well for my self and I get rid me of body pains and feel lighter so I made sure I take off at least 500 cc of blood every 3 or 6 months to get rid of accumulated toxins, crystals, and excess lipids in my system, also it also help "de-clogging" my circulatory  and lymphatic system and a sort of "blood thinners" for me that relieved my hypertension.

Whether it is for blood donation or in case you  are unfit as a blood donor it is very effective to let go of some of our old blood, to me it also allows our spleen to rest and stimulate our bone marrow to produce new and young cells make us feel young. Blood letting therapy was dismissed as quackery at some point, I believed it was because it was not done properly, there are reported death after the therapy because they used to do draining of blood up to 4 liters and during medieval times there were no aseptic procedures compared today that we have sterile blood bags and needles to collect them and we can control and measure the amount of blood taken, I think during those days they have no idea of how much volume of blood to be taken away and taken already, In medieval France, they used leeches to collect blood so you can't really control how much blood is withdrawn, I am not sure if they do blood counts already at that time. I believed in this treatment because I have proven it to myself and  know a lot of doctors (Cardiologist / Internist) in the Philippines up to this day is using this old and forgotten technique/therapy to treat their patients with hypertension and heart problems.- Tien Cho (RCB)

This is an excerpt  from Wikipedia (links in full details is provided at the bottom) to explain further, read on...

Bloodletting (or blood-letting) is the withdrawal of often little quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. Bloodletting was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluid were considered to be "humors" the proper balance of which maintained health. It was the most common medical practice performed by doctors from antiquity up to the late 19th century, a time span of almost 2,000 years. The practice has now been abandoned for all except a few very specific conditions. It is conceivable that historically, in the absence of other treatments for hypertension, bloodletting could sometimes have had a beneficial effect in temporarily reducing blood pressure by a reduction in blood volume. However, since hypertension is very often asymptomatic and thus undiagnosable without modern methods, this effect was unintentional. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the historical use of bloodletting was harmful to patients.

Today, the term phlebotomy refers to the drawing of blood for laboratory analysis or blood transfusion (see Phlebotomy (modern)). Therapeutic phlebotomy refers to the drawing of a unit of blood in specific cases like hemochromatosis, polycythemia vera, porphyria cutanea tarda, etc., to reduce the amount of red blood cells.

In the ancient world

"Bleeding" a patient to health was modeled on the process of menstruation. Hippocrates believed that menstruation functioned to "purge women of bad humors".Galen of Rome, a student of Hippocrates, began physician-initiated bloodletting. Bloodletting is one of the oldest medical practices, having been practiced among ancient peoples including the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Mayans, and the Aztecs. In Greece, bloodletting was in use around the time of Hippocrates, who mentions bloodletting but in general relied on dietary techniques. Erasistratus, however, theorized that many diseases were caused by plethoras, or overabundances, in the blood and advised that these plethoras be treated, initially, by exercise, sweating, reduced food intake, and vomiting. Herophilus advocated bloodletting. Archagathus, one of the first Greek physicians to practice in Rome, also believed in the value of bloodletting.

The popularity of bloodletting in Greece was reinforced by the ideas of Galen, after he discovered that not only veins but also arteries were filled with blood, not air as was commonly believed at the time. There were two key concepts in his system of bloodletting. The first was that blood was created and then used up; it did not circulate, and so it could "stagnate" in the extremities. The second was that humoral balance was the basis of illness or health, the four humours being blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile, relating to the four Greek classical elements of air, water, earth and fire. Galen believed that blood was the dominant humour and the one in most need of control. In order to balance the humours, a physician would either remove "excess" blood (plethora) from the patient or give them an emetic to induce vomiting, or a diuretic to induce urination.

Galen created a complex system of how much blood should be removed based on the patient's age, constitution, the season, the weather and the place. Symptoms of plethora were believed to include fever, apoplexy, and headache. The blood to be let was of a specific nature determined by the disease: either arterial or venous, and distant or close to the area of the body affected. He linked different blood vessels with different organs, according to their supposed drainage. For example, the vein in the right hand would be let for liver problems and the vein in the left hand for problems with the spleen. The more severe the disease, the more blood would be let. Fevers required copious amounts of bloodletting.

The Talmud recommended a specific day of the week and days of the month for bloodletting, and similar rules, though less codified, can be found among Christian writings advising which saints' days were favourable for bloodletting. Islamic medical authors too advised bloodletting, particularly for fevers. The practice was probably passed to them by the Greeks; when Islamic theories became known in the Latin-speaking countries of Europe, bloodletting became more widespread. Together with cautery, it was central to Arabic surgery; the key texts Kitab al-Qanun and especially Al-Tasrif li-man 'ajaza 'an al-ta'lif both recommended it. It was also known in Ayurvedic medicine, described in the Susruta Samhita.

Read full details:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/basics/bloodletting.html
http://www.library.ucla.edu/specialcollections/biomedicallibrary/bloodletting

My colleague , Marnuel Sison doing a blood letting, Modern technique and old practice, the advantage of todays technique is that we used sterile (aseptic) procedures now compared before they use knives and leeches.