Skip to main content. Find Doctors Services Locations. Medical Professionals. Research Community. Medical Learners. Job Seekers. Healthy UH View more from this blog. Preventing a Rare Complication After Surgery Reattachment operations, skin grafts and reconstructive plastic surgeries for cancer and trauma often require microsurgical techniques — the use of a microscope and specialized instruments to attach tiny blood vessels with equally tiny sutures and needles.
Keeping Blood Flowing Leech saliva contains hirudin, an anticoagulant and anti-platelet agent that works to prevent blood clots and reduce the amount of congested blood in the tissues. This keeps blood flowing to wounds to help them heal. Currently, leech therapy is seeing a revival due to its simple and inexpensive means of preventing complications. Medicinal leeches have three jaws with tiny rows of teeth.
The leeches are then allowed to extract blood, for 20 to 45 minutes at a time, from the person undergoing treatment. This equates to a relatively small amount of blood, up to 15 milliliters per leech.
Medicinal leeches most often come from Hungary or Sweden. There are several situations in which leech therapy may be used. People who may benefit include those who risk limb amputation due to the side effects of diabetes, those who have been diagnosed with heart disease, and those who are undergoing cosmetic surgery in which they risk the loss of some of their soft tissue.
The therapy has also been recommended to treat blood clots and varicose veins. People with anemia, blood clotting conditions, or compromised arteries are not candidates for leech therapy. Children under the age of 18 years old and women who are pregnant are also usually advised to avoid it. During a session, live leeches attach themselves to the target area and draw blood.
They release the proteins and peptides that thin blood and prevent clotting. This improves circulation and prevents tissue death. The leeches leave behind small, Y-shaped wounds that usually heal without leaving a scar. Leeches are effective at increasing blood circulation and breaking up blood clots.
It should be no surprise that they can be used to treat circulatory disorders and cardiovascular disease. Clinical trials suggest that leech therapy is an appropriate treatment for the common joint disease osteoarthritis. People with heart disease use leech therapy because of its potential to improve inflammation and blood flow. In the past few years, leech therapy has become an acceptable alternative therapy for people with vascular disease and disorders.
The only trouble with sucking blood is you have to do it very carefully, especially if the animal you are sucking it from is able to bite you or pull you off. So leeches, like all blood suckers, usually like to bite without causing too much pain. They like to bite in spots where they are hard to find. The other thing leeches have to worry about is that blood clots.
A blood clot forms whenever you get a cut which stops bleeding in a few minutes — eventually the blood clot forms a scab. This happens when blood contacts the air. It clumps together and forms a solid lump. The leech cannot feed if the blood forms a lump and so it releases a chemical that prevents this clumping.
This keeps the blood flowing so the leech can suck for two or three hours without stopping. That way it collects enough food to last until it finds another animal to bite. The vampiric worms have a storied place in medicine. Their first recorded therapeutic use dates back to ancient Egyptian treatments for ailments like nosebleeds and gout Chinese, Arabic, Ancient Greek, and Roman medical records also contain references to leech therapy.
In the centuries that followed, physicians used the bloodsucking powers of leeches in an attempt to remedy everything from hemorrhoids to headaches, depression, and even deafness. In 19th century Europe, Hirudo medicinalis, the medicinal leech, was so popular that it was harvested to near-extinction. But once medicine abandoned the concept that most diseases were caused by an excess of blood—a theory that often prescribed bloodletting by physicians or their bloodsucking assistants—leech therapy fell out of favor.
While ye olde physicians thought leeches could cure epilepsy and even large bruises, the contemporary use of leeches is mostly limited to microsurgeons who reattach body parts like fingers, toes, thumbs, ears, lips, noses, or even bits of scalp. One of the first times leeches were used this way was in on a five-year-old whose ear was bitten off by a dog.
Food and Drug Administration approved leeches as medical devices for use in plastic surgery making them, along with maggots, the first living creature the agency green lit for clinical use. While statistics on their medicinal use across the country are scarce, plastic surgeons say the procedure has unquestionable benefits—when hospital staff and patients can overcome the queasiness of applying the bizarre blood-sucking creatures directly to patients.
0コメント