How can leeches be helpful

There is a small risk the bacteria could get into the body part and cause an infection. Children having leech therapy must be on antibiotics that will kill the bacteria.

Blood levels of children must be monitored while they are having leech therapy, and children may occasionally need a blood transfusion. Sometimes leeches do not want to attach to a body part. This can be because there are chemicals in the skin that the leeches do not like.

The nurses and doctors will try to help the leech attach. Sometimes, even with leech therapy, the re-attached body part or graft may not survive. The re-attached part usually has no feeling, and the leech saliva has substances that prevent pain.

The biggest problem people have with leech therapy is that the leeches are not nice to look at. A polystyrene cup or covering can be placed over the leech so your child cannot see it. Many children and young people who have leech therapy are very interested in the leeches and it is a great story to tell all their friends at school.

Unfortunately the leeches contain human blood and cannot be used again. They are regarded as contaminated. When the therapy is finished, the leeches are put to sleep humanely. Tags: Surgery , Blood Clot. 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.

By the end of the Middle-Ages, doctors were using leeches to treat a wide range of disorders, including nervous system diseases, urinary and reproductive problems, inflammatory and eye diseases. Right: A medical practitioner administers leeches to a patient. Colour lithograph after L. Boilly, Medicinal leeching reached a peak in the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Leech trading became a lucrative business, with leeches exported across Europe and to the USA.

France alone required millions of leeches annually. The use of medicinal leeches began to decline around the s as diagnostic medical skills improved. Many books and papers have been published over the years, and the subject is scattered throughout the RCS Library collections, as you would expect given the popularity of the treatment. Some of the 19 th century material has been digitised as part of the UK Medical Heritage Library project.

For example, A practical treatise on the efficacy of bloodletting, in the epidemic fever of Edinburgh by Benjamin Welsh looks at the evidence for using leeches in fever cases during an outbreak in He describes treatment of 44 individuals in detail, as can be seen in this extract on Joseph Burkett, a Flaxman he survives.

In one five-year retrospective study, researchers found infections occurred in about 4 percent of people who received leech therapy. A vast majority of the about 20 adverse events related to leeches reported to the FDA since have involved infections after leech therapy or the identification of antibiotic-resistant Aeromonas by hospital staff in their leech stockpiles.

After quantifying the outcomes of hundreds of cases, they found 4. Currently, no consensus exists among the medical community for how long leeches should be applied for, or how many to use at once. But Thanik says he hopes his paper will help guide doctors presented with situations in which leech therapy could be useful but is not standard. Currently, their use is more common at teaching hospitals and trauma centers, like Bellevue, where replantation and reconstructive surgeries are more regular.

A University of Michigan analysis of about 15, people who lost their fingers between and found that an increasing number of cases are transferred to urban teaching hospitals; there, they are more than twice as likely to be reattached at an average success rate of about 80 percent. The paper also noted people with private insurance or higher income levels were more likely to undergo finger replantation. Along the same lines, in , Reavey, Thanik, and other colleagues analyzed tens of thousands of finger amputation cases from to using information pulled from national databases.