Bloodletting Above and Below
Blood letting from 'Tractatus de Pestilencia' by M. Albik
I lost a lot of blood this past week. Most of it was doctor ordered routine panels. The rest was from the feminine flow which had been suppressed for years. The pain and inflammation I had been holding in my hand from the rigorous work of moving for the past four months was suddenly relieved. Not an intended effort, but one which had me thinking of ‘bloodletting’ as a therapy.
The history of bloodletting is quite fascinating.
According to the British Columbia Medical Journal, the practice of bloodletting began around 3000 years ago with the Egyptians, continued with the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs and Asians, then spread through Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It reached its peak in Europe in the 19th century but subsequently declined and today in Western medicine is used only for a select conditions. It is fairly recent that bloodletting became discredited as a treatment for most ailments.
Bloodletting traditionally involved methods such as venesection (cutting a vein), arteiotomy (cutting an artery), scarification (scraping the skin), cupping (creating suction to draw blood), and leeching. History and horror stories can be found here.
Coincidentally, this week we witnessed bloodletting on the macro scale: Solar and Volcanic.
Eruption on the Sun 08.20.25 via Solarham.com
Mount Kilauea volcanic eruption 08.22.25 via USGS
Cosmic Bloodletting
If I can give human attributes to the sun and earth like the myth-makers of antiquity, wouldn’t coronal mass ejections and volcanic eruptions be imagined as a cosmic bloodletting? Even though we are at the descending phase of Solar Maximum 25, there’s still much activity to observe. This past week, a coronal mass ejection (CME) popped off on our Sun on August 20th. There were 3 main prominence blasting off, the largest of the solar filaments was roughly the equivalent of 20 earth sizes.
Two days later, on August 22nd, Mount Kilauea in Hawaii began erupting again. More bloodletting.
As above, so below.
According to the National Library of Medicine:
The Earth’s magnetic field is influenced by its interaction with solar winds and other external events. When the solar winds are especially active, this can create geomagnetic disturbances that influence the underlying ionosphere resulting in “space weather” that impacts electric currents, plasmas, and even fields in Earth’s magnetosphere.
Solar activity varies according to an approximate 11-year cycle that depends on variations in the sun’s magnetic field. When the sun’s magnetic field is at its maximum intensity and well organized, it contains the sun’s plasma in regions close to the sun’s surface. As a consequence, radiation in the form of bright solar flares may occur, sometimes associated with huge amounts of high-energy, high-speed charged particles that represent coronal mass ejections. When these disturbances occur, the terms geomagnetic storm, substorm, or pulsations may apply. If the changes induced in the Geomagnetic Field (GMF) are sufficiently large, the term geomagnetic storm applies and is one type of disturbance thought to affect biological processes, even though the resultant change in the GMF may be of the order of 5%. In addition to these externally induced transient field changes, there are coexisting field changes mainly due to lightning radiant energy resulting in Schumann resonances. The term heliobiology has also been used to describe possible space weather effects of solar and geomagnetic processes.
As a very broad summary of three possible groupings, there are (1) mechanisms triggered by rapid changes in the GMF, (2) mechanisms associated with resonant interactions triggered by electromagnetic fluctuations of various frequencies, and (3) mechanisms that trigger biological changes from space weather-induced changes in climatological parameters.
Magnetic Storms and Physiological Impacts of Solar Phenomena
Naturally occurring geomagnetic disturbances are thought to be associated with biological and clinical events. During solar flares and geomagnetic storms, changes in the magnetic field, particularly small pulsations of the magnetic field accompanying the geomagnetic storm, have been reported to affect human health adversely, with the heart and cardiovascular system being the main targets. Cardiovascular exacerbations have been reported to correlate with high negative values of the interplanetary magnetic field component and the geomagnetic disturbances they induce. Cardiovascular-related changes reported range from changes in blood’s properties including red cells and white cells. An indication of the possible impact on blood properties in hypertension is suggested by the reported increase of 12% in ambulance calls for hypertension-related matters.
The potential impacts of magnetic fields on cardiovascular parameters have often been studied via laboratory experiments in which animals were exposed to magnetic fields of various intensities and the impacts of such exposure on blood properties, heart rate, and blood flow are evaluated.
The initiation of these blood property changes has been variably reported to occur shortly before the GMF change or in synchrony with the abrupt change in the GMF. Such GMF-linked blood property changes are not present in all persons and there appears to be an increased sensitivity in women and in persons with co-present hypertension. The utility of these findings in assessing or treating persons with known or suspected hypertension remains to be determined via future research.