Ongoing History Daily: Extreme blood transfusions

One of the most infamous rock-and-medicine tales involves Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones checking into a European clinic to have all the drugs filtered out of his system. The story is that he underwent something called hemodialysis which removes toxic substances from the blood, saving the kidneys an awful lot of trouble.

Keith isn’t the only one to have gone through this. Lemmy, the frontman of Motorhead, thought about doing the same thing in 1980 after years of booze, amphetamines, and other substances, started take a toll on his body. He never went through with it because his doctor told him (allegedly) that he was so toxic, clean blood would kill him.

Meanwhile, Keef never had it done, either. Although the story shows up in several biographies, it turns out that he just made it all up.