On Saturday 18 December 2004 12:11, Jerry in Houston wrote: > <<carries around a bucketful of leeches, >> > > Leeches are making a medical comeback.... seems they > can be pretty useful afterall.
As I recall, the best medical use for leeches these days is in the post-operative phase of surgery to reattach severed fingers. As it was explained to me: to reattach a severed finger, surgeons must go in and actually repair individual blood vessels. The surgery is very fiddly, being done by means of microscopes and tiny needles and so on. Should blood clot in any of the newly-repaired blood vessels, the whole operation would fail and the finger would need to be amputated. To prevent this, surgeons apply leeches. The leeches eat any blood that leaks out of the wound, and, since leech saliva contains an extremely powerful anticoagulant, they keep blood flowing to the reattached finger. Neatness. Certainly cooler than my dad's boy scout stories of his scoutmaster lighting a cigarette and burning the leeches off the boys after a jungle hike (he was a scout in the Philippines) -Luigi
