29 JAN 2019: It’s a beautiful warm sunny day, you’re relaxing lakeside with a cold drink and a deep exhale as your stress melts away. I mean does it get any better? You top it off with a successful cannon ball (with perfect form no less) into the beautiful fresh water lake, and you take a moment to revel in the shear bliss. You towel off and get back to the business of sunbathing and topping up on your vitamin D. As you return to your lounge chair you notice your towel must’ve missed a piece of lake weed that is stuck on your left side, just above your hip. As you brush it off you realize its slimy, a bit squishy and really quite stuck on there…you realize it’s not actually lake weed at all and panic sets in.
A leech!
Turns out the little bugger wanted in on your slice of paradise and figured why not hitch a free ride (it is a leech after all). While you’ve probably never considered leech exposure as being a desirable experience, many people actually have. Not for a particular fetish either, but for their own health benefit.
This is not some quack new-age-practise either, in fact, leeches were used medicinally for thousands of years to treat everything from acne and headaches, to the black plague, and everything in between. In the Victorian Era, Britain used over 42 million medicinal leeches per year with Wales touted as the medicinal leech capital of Europe. This was largely due to the ecological landscape of the mud lands in Pembrokeshire being an ideal habitat. Leeches were so wildly popular that they were almost harvested to extinction. Around the same time we began to realize that perhaps leeches were not as omnipotent as we once thought them to be, and they began to fall out of favour.
Although not completely…
We realized while not a cure all, we were onto something with these bloodsuckers after all. Today, Wales is still home to one of the largest medicinal leech farms in Europe. Biopharm provides over 60,000 leeches to hospitals throughout the continent each year. Other markets around the world, particularly in Russia, have also caught on to this practise as well.
Why the heck would anyone want the leech experience?
Three sets of jaws and some three hundred tiny teeth are engaged in a leech bite as they hold on to feed on your blood. Hardly sounds therapeutic I know, but they actually support strategic blood flow that has proven beneficial in various conditions. Leech therapy is most often used to help speed recovery after cosmetic or reconstructive surgeries, as the blood flow accelerates healing.
One of the complications of diabetes includes poor blood flow, especially in the feet, and the unfortunate result is tissue death and necessary amputation. However, a recent case study credits leech therapy for saving the foot of a 60 year old patient living with diabetes, and shows just 4 leeches per session can significantly reduce the risk for amputation. Researchers have also looked at the role of leeches in other conditions including lung cancer, high blood pressure and even reversing hair loss. Who knew?
Before we all go wading into a fresh water pond in search of leeches, our hairline and our youth, not all leeches are suitable for medicinal purposes. If you find yourself an unsuspecting host to a leech, the safest thing to do is to wait out the feeding period, at which point the leech will drop off again to continue on it’s merry way. Unfortunately for the squeamish, that feeding period can be anywhere from 15-40 minutes – talk about fast food! This eternity can be expedited by adding a sprinkle of salt which makes the leech uncomfortable enough to justify leaving the buffet a little early.
The landscape of healthcare is changing as people are looking for more options and alternative methods of healing. While many traditional health practises are often credited to the ancient cultures of China and India, perhaps we should add a few folk therapies from Britain into the mix. Over the next few weeks we will explore some of the traditional folk remedies that have stood the test of time and are still providing relief to folks today. Medical travel is one of the fastest growing segments of tourism, and while it may not be the medicine of the future, leech therapy just might be a viable option worth looking into.