Records from Zoologist Sovier's works are the oldest proof of using live leeches as a treatment: more than 2,000 years ago, some people in India used European leeches to suck blood from patients, including treating snake bites, burns and eye diseases.
From 1820 to 1845, the application of medical leeches in Europe reached its peak. A French surgeon believes that all diseases can be attributed to gastroenteritis, and the treatments for this disease are starvation, bloodletting and medical leeches. He recommended 30 kinds of leeches as medical leeches, which were specially used to suck blood. Obesity, flu, asthma, nausea, tuberculosis, dysentery and constipation, people want to use European medical leeches to treat almost all diseases. In the book published at that time, a doctor named Glass was introduced. He used 80 medical leeches to treat people at a time. Under such crazy use, many patients are unconscious due to excessive blood loss during treatment. But in most cases, leeches still have a certain inhibitory effect on inflammation and pain.
When medical leeches are widely used in Europe, hospitals in Paris alone need 6 million medical leeches every year. There are also scenes in nature where girls go to lakes or ponds to catch leeches. There are also many people who drive horses into the river just to attract a lot of leeches. Many horses bled to death.
Germany even promoted the prosperity of this trade. Because the number of medical leeches in America is far less than that in Europe, a large number of European medical leeches were transported from Hamburg to the United States in the19th century. As a result, European medical leeches almost disappeared in Germany from 65438 to 0900. Today, there are very few places where they hang out.
In the early 1980s, with the development of replantation technology and microsurgery technology, living leeches were used to treat patients in internal and external medicine, and leeches became the right-hand man of doctors.
In replantation of severed limbs, once the aorta is successfully sutured, blood can flow into human tissues, and then the facial function is restored to allow blood to enter the circulatory system, otherwise the fingers will swell due to congestion until necrosis.
In the past, if there was local congestion and swelling in replantation surgery, it would cost doctors a lot of effort, and various methods might be exhausted, which was difficult to work, leading to the failure of the operation. With the leech assistant, in this operation, the doctor will put live leeches on the surgical wound, and they will go all out to suck out the dirty blood from the wound without any orders. At the same time, the natural hirudin in leech saliva will also exert great power, dilate blood vessels, prevent thrombosis, promote the recovery of venous system, make venous vessels unobstructed instantly, and greatly improve the success rate of surgery. And don't worry about infection, because the special preservative contained in leech saliva can prevent wound infection itself. The chemicals secreted during blood sucking can stimulate the wound to increase the blood flow to the implant and prevent the new limb from necrosis due to lack of fresh blood.
65438-0987 Leech Research Group of Institute of Aquatic Animals of China Academy of Sciences cooperated with Orthopedics Department of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Hubei Medical University. In China, medical leeches were used for the first time to treat blood stasis after replantation of severed fingers, which achieved great success. Since then, many hospitals have begun to introduce leech therapy, and leeches have appeared in replantation or transplantation of fingers, toes, ears and nose many times. So far, there are countless successful cases.
In recent years, with the increasing fame of leeches, leeches have also appeared in plastic surgery. Doctors use leeches to eliminate blood stasis and reduce necrosis in the vascular occlusion area after operation, so as to improve the success rate of tissue transplantation and breast augmentation.