Plastic Surgery & Leeches

Leeches at Work

Some reconstructive plastic surgeons were in a dither. In one case, a patient’s fingers had been severed and could be surgically reattached, except no blood coursed through the detached fingers, partly because some veins and arteries were suffering what plastic surgeons know as “congestion”.  The reattached fingers were taking blood in but not letting any out. So the blood just pooled, without circulation.

In another case in Louisiana, a dog attacked a woman and ripped off her eyelid that was fairly easily reattached by a plastic surgeon who is also a clinical associate professor at Louisiana State University. Using sutures smaller than a human hair, the professor sewed the eyelid back and then found the reattached part was also suffering blood pooling, literally screaming for the nutrients carried in blood.

(Read about cosmetic eyelid surgery.)

When veins or arteries are damaged, they often lack the ability to circulated blood, risking infection and the loss of the reattached part.

If a finger, toe, eyelid, nose, ear or scalp is detached from a patient, plastic surgeons can only connected arteries down to a certain size. So smaller arteries are left without blood flow.

Answer: call in the leeches. Now, don’t get grossed out, but the leeches used in reconstructive plastic surgery are specially grown in sterile conditions and even have their own medical name: Hirudo medicinalis. In the United States, the FDA cleared the use of medical leeches in 2004.

The chubby, four-inch long, blood-sucking worms also have in their saliva a natural anesthetic and an anticoagulant (hirudein) that loosens or breaks up blood clots to get and keep blood flowing  — or at least oozing – until the body’s circulation system takes over.

Actually, the use of medical leeches is something that has come back into use again. 3,500 years ago, the ancient Egyptians used leeches to treat everything from tonsillitis to hemorrhoids.