Hello! I have been a doctor for 21 years. My name is Georgy Olegovich Sapego. In this article I will tell you about how I did hirudotherapy.
A hirudotherapist is a doctor who heals with leeches.
Leeches are called medicine milk cows. They are adored.
Such different brothers
Leeches are annelids. They are cousins of earthworms. I want you to introduce a cute earthworm. From my childhood I have only fond memories of these creatures. Like dandelions. Do you remember?
And here they are leeches. These are also annelids with three lips. Just behind these lips, the leeches have three jaws with which they saw through the skin. The jaws leave a scar of three rays on the skin, reminiscent of the emblem of a famous car brand. From such scars, you can recognize the victim of leeches.
Not only do these worms have teeth, but they also know how to flatten and turn into flat fish. Leeches wriggle and swim in the water like eels or sea snakes.
That's not all. They can walk, stepping over like a caterpillar. At the front and rear end of the body, they have a suction cup.
Even leeches can stand. They usually live in fresh water, but there are land leeches in humid tropical climates. They stand on the leaves of plants and, like our native forest mites, wait for their prey.
If you keep leeches at home, they can crawl out of the can and stand on its edge. There is such a dirty trick, swaying and watching you.
If the leech sticks, then it is difficult to tear it off. Having sucked in, the leech begins to secrete mucus with its skin. You try to tear it off, but it is slippery and smooth - you cannot pick it up.
Sucking on the skin, the leech gnaws a hole and drinks blood. She can drink 10 times her weight. Then the leech usually disappears. If you are unlucky enough to swallow a leech, then it may not fall off. This muck can crawl into any hole on the body and stay there for a long time.
In general, having got drunk, the leech can eat nothing for a year. She will digest blood. Inside the leech there are special water microbes that prevent the blood from going rancid. Gradually digesting the blood, over the course of a year the leech decreases in size and becomes a tiny little bit.
After a leech bite, a bleeding wound remains. The leech injects hirudin into the skin, which prevents blood from clotting. On average, bleeding lasts about 10 hours. Sometimes blood flows from the wound for a week. In the first hours, approximately 1 milliliter per minute flows out. Have you counted? A lot can flow out. This is the danger of the leech and this is its benefit.
Yes, there may be benefits. First, I'll tell you about the official indications for hirudotherapy.
Osteoarthritis
Attaching four leeches to the affected knee for osteoarthritis is an approved method of treating joint pain. They only do it once. They put it on, removed it and forgot it. They do not do 10 sessions of 10 leeches. No. Just one session, four leeches and - goodbye!
Plastic surgery
Second official option. Improving the blood supply to the transplanted skin. This is what plastic surgeons do.
It happens that a severed nose is sewn back on to a person or a wound on the leg is covered with a piece of skin transplanted from a soft place. Such a flap itself does not always take root well, it hurts and swells. Blood stagnates in it, and blood circulation there urgently needs to be improved.
So, plastic surgeons put leeches on the transplanted piece of skin. Guess how this improves circulation? No, you didn't guess. Hirudin does not clear the vessels in the skin flap. These are all stories. In fact, it is just a hole in the skin through which blood is drained.
That is, from the swollen area, blood will not flow into the veins and further into the heart, but simply out into the bandage. You get a valve that relieves excess pressure. So the edema subsides, and the blood will not stagnate. The blood circulation is improved. Excess blood flows out into the environment. A very ingenious method of treatment.
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