REVOLTING REMEDIES

Disgusting medical treatments

This week: Leeches

THEY may be associated with the Victorian medical practice of bloodletting, but specially bred leeches are sometimes used to help restore blood flow to delicate areas.

In 2004, the journal Urology published the first reported case of ‘penile replantation with leech therapy’. A team of surgeons at Texas University had been performing an emergency operation on a patient whose penis had been severed.

The operation was initially successful, but problems with restoring blood flow to the area led to the skin dying off, making the area increasingly vulnerable to infection. To overcome this, the surgeons attached six medicinal leeches to the wound site — as the leeches suck clotted blood, blood flow is increased in small vessels. A decade later, the same journal reported a successful repeat of the procedure, this time by paediatric surgeons at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Leeches were used over a three-day period on a seven-day-old boy whose circumcision had gone badly wrong.