Leech Therapy: It Really Sucks

Demi Moore did it. Now you can too.

Last year the 46-year-old actress, whose husband Ashton Kutcher is a mere 31, admitted to having leech therapy to “detoxify” her blood. The method was simple: she shaved her body, doused herself in turpentine, then allowed the nasty little creatures to suck away.

Moore was in Austria filming away, she told NBC’s David Letterman, when she felt a spot of leech therapy coming on. “I feel like I’ve always been someone looking for the cutting edge of things that optimize your health and healing,” she said.

The experience was less disgusting than you might think. “It crawls in and you feel it bite down on you and you want to go, ‘You bastard’. Then you relax and work on your breathing just to kind of relax,” Demi said.

“You watch it swell up on your blood, watching it get fatter and fatter - then when it’s super drunk on your blood it just kind of rolls over like it’s stumbling out of the bar.”

She added that she had the beauty therapist practice with a leech on her belly button first.

What is Leech Therapy?

While the nasty sight of a blood-sucking leech on your body may make you want to hurl, this alternative therapy dates back at least 5,000 years ago in Egypt. Medicinal leeches, which are actually worms, have been traditionally used the world over to cure all sorts of ailments, from fevers to flatulence; headaches to hemorrhoids. In fact, there is even a word used to describe the use of the slimy critters in medicine: hirudotherapy.

Leeches were popular not so long ago with 19th-century blood letters, who believed that getting rid of “bad blood” in the system would make you healthier (kind of like Demi). But they made a big comeback in the 1980s, when scientists realized how helpful the little suckers could be in performing medical miracles like helping reattach limbs and promote wound healing.

The reason is simple: leeches are parasites which live off the blood of their host. When they bite a person (or a dog, or an alligator), there is an enzyme in their saliva which is released, preventing the blood from clotting. This anti-coagulant also has antiseptic qualities: in fact, leech saliva contains more than 30 proteins, some of which can also help relieve pain and reduce numbness.

In plastic surgery, leeches are sometimes used to relive venous congestion, especially when it comes to transplant surgery. When a limb has to be amputated, these wily worms can help nourish the tissue of bone, stopping swelling and allowing fresh blood to enter the reconnected arm, leg or even breast tissue so it doesn’t die. Leeches are also being investigated to see if they really can help lessen both pain and inflammation associated with osteoarthritis, a debilitating bone disease (they have been placed on sufferers’ knees, with good results). And rumor has it that they have been used in dermatology and ophthalmology, and even to treat the inner ear.

For people such as Demi, the leech therapy used hearkens back to old times, when people believed that bad blood makes you sick (it can), and that having a leech suck it out will make you better (dubious). Either that, or the entire experience is just more proof that she has a great PR guru behind her…

Lovely Leech Facts

There are lots of other interesting factoids about these versatile worms, including:

• Leeches live in clean, fresh water.
• While leeches love to suck blood, some choose to feed off other meals instead, such as gnats and mosquito larvae.
• Although they are not marsupials, leeches have a kangaroo-type pouch where they keep their young until they’re old enough to become rampant blood-suckers themselves.
• Leeches have three jaws, and each one has about 100 teeth.
• A leech can suck up to five times in body weight in its favorite food: blood.
• There are many species of leech. Ones used for bait are not used in medicine.
• Many medicinal leeches are imported from Eastern Europe or France for use in the US.

Medical Maggots

There’s a word for using live animals to aid in treatment of a medical condition, or the diagnosis of one: biotherapy. And leeches are not the only animals used for bio-therapeutical reasons. Maggots, or fly larvae, are another rather disgusting vermin which have great medical benefits. They eat dead and infected tissue but leave the healthy tissue intact. This is accomplished by their little gift of turning dead tissue into a type of mulch, which they then yum up.

Diabetic Pamela Mitchell, for example, faced losing her feet to the condition – then read about the wonders of medical maggots. She was facing amputation due to infection when she found a doctor who bought a plate of the (disinfected) beasts, which cost about $80, and let them go to work.

“They eat JUST the dead infected tissue (not the good like surgery does), they excrete enzymes to promote healing and they kill all the bacteria,” she has written. “My feet have been healed for over seven years now. Barely a scar and I had a ulcer two inches around and one inch deep and 1/2 inch of exposed bone.

“Most doctors do not know all the benefits of maggot therapy and need to be informed. So do the research and teach your doctor a thing or two.” Maggots cost a lot less than conventional methods and new methods allow them to be produced in a sterile environment consistent for medical use.

Leeches – I’m Lovin’ It!

If you fancy a bit of leech therapy, or having a host of maggots eat your dead tissue, ask your doctor about whether this is really the therapy for you. If it is, some advice from Demi might come in handy.

“The other thing I found out is that leeches don’t like hair,” she told David Letterman. So if you are hairy, “be prepared to do some shaving or waxing - they much prefer a Brazilian.”

Nice.

You may want to get some leeches in quick – scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a medical version of the blood suckers, which does the job minus the gross-out factor. It might cost a lot more, but some patients might prefer the stainless steel version to the real McCoy. While leeches can only such for a limited period of time, the machine’s thirst is seemingly unquenchable. And it could also carry a smaller risk of infection.

That’s not the only risk leech therapy could bring. Other risks include the possibility of losing so much blood you’d require a transfusion, and that a leech (or two) could squirm away from the desired area, and get lost in some bodily orifice or another. Now that’s a thought!