Latching on to a Remedy

Patients’ reluctance to allow leeches to suck their blood is justifiable when you consider the parasite’s three jaws and 300 teeth (“Medicinal”). Leech therapy brings about nightmarish scenes from the Middle Ages, when doctors would prescribe the blood-sucking creatures for almost any ailment and encourage the annelids to extract a large amount of the patient’s blood, the good and the bad. As a potential patient, I am personally very happy to say that the medical field has come a long way in the past few hundred years, and leeches now offer aid to patients (in a legitimate, regulated, scientifically-proven sort of way) and even more hope for medicinal benefits in the future. Now the main issues facing the widespread use of leeches in the medical world are a bad reputation and a scary history, but patients and medical providers alike need to look at new research and practices that are saving lives and easing pain in patients suffering from an array of ailments, from facial reconstructive surgery to osteoarthritis in a bum knee. Leeches have not always played a positive role in medicine but should once again be a topic of research and treatment, as they can save lives with their combination of physical abilities and chemical properties.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leeching-large.jpeg

Leeches have ridden a roller coaster of popularity with humans throughout history, at least dating back to the time of pharaohs and pyramids, with drawings of leeches in an ancient Egyptian tomb as evidence. Hippocrates advocated the use of leeches in balancing the four humors in Classical Greece, and we have reason to believe that the doctor of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius also supported the practice of bloodletting in the 2nd century. Fast-forward some centuries to medieval times when hirudotherapy, the medicinal use of leeches, once again experienced a resurgence. Except by the late 1800s, people were catching onto the fact that the bloodletting of the time was not actually helping the patients but making them sicker; as you can imagine, this proved to be a serious blow to the leech industry, which struggled until the mid-20th century (“Suckers”). Luckily for all of us as potential hosts to these helpful parasites, the past half-century has proved to be a good one in the world of hirudotherapy, as leeches are growing in popularity and use across the world.

The first and better-known advantage of leeches is their vampire-esque talent of bloodsucking. While this sounds to me an unpleasant process, bloodletting is finding success with many plastic surgeries because leeches are considered to help the reattachment of digits by preventing clotting of the veins. In fact, in a survey of over 50 plastic surgery units in the UK and Ireland conducted in 2002, 80% of the units had used leeches (“Suckers”). Also, Ed Susman cites in his article 15 cases in which leeches were successfully used to save free flap reconstructions and preserve blood flow in the tissues. While surgery or therapy would have been unable to remove the obstructions, leeches were able to save the patient from another surgery and salvage the flap.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sucking_leech.jpg

Besides their obvious bloodsucking tendencies, leeches also have some very special saliva. Hirudotherapy is prescribed to lessen the pain from osteoarthritis because, as the Nature article explains, “Among the 30 or so biologically active substances in their saliva are molecules that stop inflammation and blood clotting, both of which are involved in arthritis” (“Suckers”). Gustav Dobos of the University of Essen in Germany had successfully treated osteoarthritis in the knee with hirudotherapy, and then moved to testing the leeches’ success on thumb arthritis. Dobos conducted a study of 32 women with arthritis in the thumb and found that leeches led to a greater decrease in pain and kept the pain away for longer than a painkilling ointment. Leeches lessen the pain of osteoarthritis by “inject[ing] a blood-thinning chemical called hirudin and several substances that fight inflammation.” While typical painkilling injections or pills have not proved very effective in arthritis treatment, leeches’ natural chemical hirudin has proved to work wonders.

While leech therapy has not rebounded to its 19th century status, hirudotherapy is definitely on the rise, and rightfully so. Biopharm leeches, Britain’s largest supplier of medicinal leeches, based in Hendy, Wales, ships a staggering 50,000 leeches a year. The market for leeches is not just in Europe, with Ricarimpex in Eysines, a firm in France, allowed clearance in 2004 from the United States Food and Drug Administration to sell its leeches in America as medical devices (“Suckers”). Some doctors warn against the possible side effects of hirudotherapy, especially regarding the risk of infection after leech use. While this is a threat that needs to be taken into consideration, if patients use leeches in the proper way with adequate supervision, the risk should not cause serious problems. Also, knowing of the chance of infection allows doctors to be ready to prescribe antibiotics; no one wants to be on antibiotics, but if one round of medicine is the price of no more osteoarthritis, I’d say it is a price I’m willing to pay. Leeches have proven that they are determined to stick around the medical world, so we should embrace the bloodsuckers as a valuable resource and continue to research their impressive bloodletting and chemical substances.

Works Cited 

Aeromonas Meningitis Complicating Medicinal Leech Therapy by John P. Ouderkirk et. Al., Clinical Infectious Diseases

“Leech Therapy Proves Successful in Long‐Term Follow‐Up for Head & Neck Cancer Surgery Reconstruction” by Ed Susman, Oncology Times

“Medicinal Leeches: Stuck on You.” Nature. 432.7013 (2004): n. page. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

"Suckers for Success." Nature. 484.7395 (2012): n. page. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.

“Thumbs up for Leech Therapy,” ScienceNOW