Originally published at: This educational video shows a leech sucking someone's blood out | Boing Boing
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I can’t see the video here in the BBS, so I’m just picturing Don Jr. instead of clicking.
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Leech Spit
Opening band for GWAR?
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I was thinking “Putin with regard to Ukraine”… but that pretty much amounts to the same thing.
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Blood Letting, don’t show that to…
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“Medicinal leeches”? Is that really a thing?
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It is! They actually have a legitimate medical use.
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Absolutely. You don’t just want any old leeches sucking on you. Never know where they’ve been. They are bred for purpose, being large and good suckers (hungry). Also you don’t just pass them from person to person. After each use they are popped into saline water which makes them purge all their blood. And they are kept in rotation and maybe not used again for another 6 months. Apparently good for cleaning up severe burns and saving limbs from gangrene by promoting bloodflow.
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Really, I didn’t know that. Seems kind of a dick move, tbh.
This is something that was gotten wrong in the new movie, “The Lost City”.
Today I learned. Thanks.
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Interesting video. Really awful music. I don’t mean scary, just really unpleasant-sounding.
They’re just lil’ hungry guys who see you walking around full of village-sized quantities of food you aren’t using. They’re trying hard not to bother you, I mean, most people who eat 15ml of you will be much bigger jerks about it.
Obviously if I found one on me I’d still kill it. And its children.
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You are Dr. Hoffmann (of Stuttgart), and I claim my £5!
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Leeches are a fascinating if not icky subject and have been used for thousands of years in India and China. The enzyme Hirudin that leeches inject into your body as they gorge on blood is some pretty amazing stuff. It dissolves plaque in your blood vessels and so is an important anti-stroke therapy. Obviously, it lowers blood pressure. In Traditional Chinese Medicine they also use dehydrated leeches and you can buy these on ebay. I took some leech powder in capsule form for a while. I can’t imagine how bad it would taste.There are quite a few devotees in the US who self administer leeches and in India the therapy is practised often primatively - but personally I would rather have them applied in a Western clinical setting (I’d do it myself but they are not cheap and like any “pet” you have to look after them). I couldn’t find a vid I’d seen where a leech was disgorged by putting it briefly in salt water. It just takes a big cough and ejects the blood. But there are lots of interesting vids on utube - just google leech therapy - and some from India where they show people manually purging the beasts (gruesome).
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Thats actually quite fascinating.
I watched this video yesterday morning. Later in the afternoon I looked down at my arm and saw that I was bleeding lightly from a small hole on my arm (a scratched scab). My first thought of course was “was that leech?”
Thanks BoingBoing!
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If I may add: it’s even in the scientific name.
Just for the record, to this day, I can order some medical leeches at the pharmacy, over the counter without prescription.
They are raised under controlled conditions, and as @ludd mentioned, that’s quite a relief to know. When I lived in a shared flat during my studies, we ordered some and fed them. Interesting feeling.
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