Unless, that is, men vented the toxic imbalances by bleeding each other. The practice was done monthly. Senior monks bled junior ones, and the runoff juices were examined for the decayed matter that should be present if a man weren't illicitly copulating or masturbating. A monk who confessed to great temptations of the flesh was forced to shed volumes of blood until his desires abated. Such profuse bleeding surely must have taken the mind off sex, for a while at least.
Monks spread their medical theory among the laity.
It was thought that menstruation in women was natures own way to detoxify her body. But a postmenopausal women was supposed to undergo periodic bleedings. In this manner, bloodletting moved from a onetime medical cure-all to a prophylactic and then to an abuse of bodies of both the healthy and the sick. Bleeding hemorrhoids even became an ailment to be desired. It quenches the fires in the blood of the lovesick.