Leech Therapy in Modern Treatment

Picture this: You're chopping a steak with a big meat cleaver and—wham!—off comes your right index finger. Picture putting the finger in a jar and taking it with you to the hospital. Now picture a doctor carefully sewing the finger back on, and within hours the finger is blue and swollen with blood. 

Grossed out yet? Good! Because now you can picture sticking a hungry leech on the end of that finger and—presto!—the finger returns to a nice healthy pink. This is one of the leech's greatest talents. When a finger or thumb is reattached, it's relatively easy to hook up the arteries, because they're thicker and tougher. Veins, on the other hand, are fragile and crumple up easily. So, until new capillaries can to re-connect these damaged veins, what you end up with is blood with a one-way ticket into a reattached finger. With no veins to carry it back out, the finger swells up and chokes itself off with blood clots. 

Leeches are ideal in this situation because they suck the blood slowly and steadily. (If you drain the blood too fast, you may as well not have bothered to reattach the finger.) To drain blood at just the right rate without using leeches, surgeons sometimes turn to an even more disgusting (and less effective) procedure that involves ripping off a fingernail and scraping the nail bed raw so it bleeds at a slow and steady rate. Given the choice, most doctors—and patients—opt for the leeches. 

Plus, leeches secrete natural anticoagulants that prevent the blood from clotting. One of these chemicals, hirudin, is so powerful that it's being studied as a possible therapeutic drug for people who have had heart attacks and strokes. These chemicals allow the wound to bleed slowly even after the leech has been removed, while the patient's new veins are still forming. 

Leeches have been used in medicine for over 2,500 years. They were more popular in earlier times because it was widely thought that most diseases were caused by an excess of blood. As recently as the 19th century, leeches were used to treat everything from tonsillitis to hemorrhoids. You can imagine what both of those treatments involved. 

Today, their use is more limited, but in some circumstances, they're still the best option.

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