February 15, 2022 • 50 mins
Leeches are pretty creepy. They feed on blood, they stick to you body. We get it. But they're also pretty fascinating and worthy of discussion.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. And this is the
leeches episode that we've all been waiting for for about
a million years. Yeah, this is I love this kind
(00:23):
of stuff though, because there's the general you know, stuff
you should know, classic bug slash animal kind of show. Okay,
got it, but then you got your whole second half
of the episode, which is super interesting. Yep. I mean
the other stuff is interesting too, but you know what
I mean, it's a it's a I know, it's a
(00:44):
basically a perfect stuff you should Know episode. Dave Ruce
called it a S Y s K softball as if too,
as if to say that he couldn't have gotten it wrong.
It was just too great of a stuff you should
know topic. Yeah, he did a great job, though, always does.
He did great Yep. So we're talking leeches, and I
think Chuck this actually this episode was inspired by our
(01:05):
dentistry episode where we talked about using medical leeches for
dentistry all the way up until like the nineteen teens.
I think leeches on the gums not a pleasant thought, no,
And it sounds bonkers and wacky um and repulsive, but
they have come back into fashion in some medical circles,
(01:25):
and not just like new ag circles, like actual medical circles.
So it's like you said, we're gonna make this kind
of a two parter in a one one episode, let's
do it. So we're talking leeches, and we should probably
start with leech biology. And if you want to know
what a leech is, uh is cousin to, you need
(01:46):
look no further than a few inches underground and some
fertile soil at our friend the earthworm, which was another
great stuff you should know episode. Yeah, that was a
really good one. But yeah, if you want to get
up close and look at a leech, which you probably
are not prone to do, uh, they are ringed, just
like our little friends the earthworm. They have thirty two
segments in their little gross looking bodies and they inch
(02:10):
along like worms stew as well. They have you know,
a head sucker up at the front and a sucker
in the rear. No jokes necessary there, Yeah, oral an
anal is it really called the anal sucker. It's also
called the anterior imposterior sucker too, and or the party
(02:31):
in the this is in the front, party in the rear. Sure,
I couldn't tell the day was joking. I figured it
was called an anal sucker, but uh yeah, they just
inch along just like an inch worm or a worm
might by expanding and contracting and using those suckers. That's right. Um.
I saw that the the oral sucker, the the anterior sucker,
(02:54):
was the one that's typically used for feeding, and that
the sucker on the rear is the one that you
us to help propel the leech forward. Um. I didn't
see definitively that it can't feed on the rear anal sucker,
but um, it's possible it can't. I did see that
it's primarily used for locomotion, So whatever science writer wrote
(03:16):
that was hedging their bets. Yeah. The other thing I
thought was interesting was land leeches, which we're not going
to talk too much about because you know, most of
the leeches that we're acquainted with you will find in
the water. But land leeches do a a tick like thing,
and they're both bloodsuckers. Like remember how ticks will attach
to a plant and then just like start snapping their
(03:37):
little lobster claws everywhere hoping something walks by. Yeah, they're like, hey,
come get me somebody. The land leach does a similar
thing and attaches the rear sucker to a branch or
a leaf or something and then just sort of does
a little shimmy shake with her head, hoping that something
will walk by so it can just stick its little
face into it. It's just there in chimmys and it's like,
(03:58):
you'd like this, huh, you'd like that, Come get it.
And they're both bloodsuckers, and they both do very desperate
things to attach to a body. I know they also
un I know tis Yeah, I know. Ticks and leeches
both also share the trait of um being able to
um detect c O two as a way to detect prey,
(04:20):
at least the land leeches too. So yeah, that definitely
stuck out to me as well. UM. And I feel
like there's some really great myths out there on the
Internet that we're gonna get to just um crush, crumble
myth crushers. Yeah, that's perfect myth. We're gonna crush those myths, um.
And one of them is that leeches have thirty two brains,
which is definitively false. No, they have thirty two body segments.
(04:45):
And you will see people on the internet that say
they have a brain in each segment, but they don't.
They have to brains, one up front and one in
the back, and like a lot of little critters that
can be cut off and still function. You can cut
their brain off and they can survive and do quite well. Yeah.
The reason that people say thirty two brains, by the way,
(05:08):
that's what Google says. If you just type in leech brain,
it serves you up leech has thirty two brains. There's ganglia,
which are basically relay stations between these two brains in
each of the segment, and those segments can those ganglia
can make each segment function autonomously and be responsible for
(05:28):
some other stuff. So that's why people are like, yeah,
each one's a brain, but it's it's really not. It's
not each a brain. It's just kind of like an extended,
stretched out segmented brain. Yeah, but they're notren't thirty two
ganglia either, right, The ones on each end are kind
of fused together, so there's twenty one total. Yeah, that's
that's what I saw. See that the computers are all wrong. Yeah,
(05:51):
Google's got it wrong again. It's the computer, right. Sure,
it sounds like, Wow, I'm really getting old. The computer
is wrong. Yeah, it's you sound like somebody who like
types under the keyboard like this, right, computers wrong? Remember
what I said to you, like fourteen years ago before
(06:13):
we were even podcast hos, I remember what I say.
You pay me the high compliment of saying that when
I type, I type very loudly, especially when I'm into it,
that it sounds like the loneous monk away. I can't
believe you remember that. Oh yeah, it was a very
high compliment as far as I took it, like I
had a tattooed on my arm bit, my inner arm bit,
(06:37):
and I made you me get the same type. She's like,
it doesn't make sense, but I love you. Uh so.
Leech species are about six to seven hundred of them,
and they generally fall into three categories depending on what
they eat. Um because you know, we know they're blood suckers,
but not all of them are exclusively blood suckers. No,
(07:01):
And if they're blood suckers, they are called two of
the greatest words. Take your pick, uh sanguivorous or hamado
fadgis either way, it means that they subsist on blood.
They're not. They don't want any of your skin or
your flesh, or your muscles or great steak. They just
want the blood. But yeah, like you said, not all
of them are are blood suckers. There's some called worm
(07:22):
leeches that eat an entire invertebrates, very very small invertebrates.
But they they don't they don't really care about the
blood or else they're they're not just interested in the blood.
But most leeches, as far as we as as we
think of leeches, are sanguivorous. Yeah, but the other two
categories are pretty horrifying. And how they get their blood
(07:42):
out It's like one sounds really bad and then the
next one doesn't sound much better. Kind of thing. Uh.
The jawed leeches the one that we're most uh commonly,
you know, when you're when you're watching stand by me
and poor little Will wheat and gets a leech on
his pp Which, now that we've seen that, and now
that I should say, now that we've researched this, they
(08:03):
got it so wrong. Those kids really did it wrong
when they remove the leeches, Oh for sure, and it's
probably unlikely that that leech would have made his way
to its pp that quickly. Yeah, you never know. I
heard they do like kind of a warm, secluded area
to do their work. Will Eaton used to listen to
(08:24):
the show. I wonder I doubt if he still does.
Oh shout out to two thousand ten. Will He's like,
quit talking about my BP. But that's the jawed leech,
the one that you know, the one that's kind of
the most common and most familiar with. And it's we're
gonna talk about medicinal leeches later. That's what they use there.
But these things will feed on almost anything that they
(08:47):
can latch onto that has blood. Um, mammals, frogs, birds, fish,
basically anything that can get a hold of that has
blood it will latch onto. They strongly prefer mammals, though
the rest of this stuff is just kind of junk
food basically formed from where I can tell. Can we
talk just for a second about how the jawed leeches, um,
(09:08):
how they do their thing. Yeah, with those little razor
sharp teeth, let's do it. It's scary. So they have
like if you look at a picture of a jawed
leech mouth, everybody says it looks like a Mercedes emblem,
and and it does. There's really no better way to
put it. But if you zoom in closer, there's a
bunch of little teeth on there right called denticles, and
they act as like circular saws. So like the leech
(09:31):
itself starts making this kind of sucking motion or inhale
exhale really quickly and creates us like suction within its
body cavity. So when it's when it puts its lips
on you, it actually creates suction. And then when it
uses those little denticles that act as like little circular saws,
it just keeps sawing deeper and deeper into your skin,
finally reaching a blood vessel. When it strikes gold, red gold,
(09:55):
which you and I would call blood, it just sucks
out into the leach because it's created a vacuum pump. Yeah,
and I love this. Where did you get this, uh
that that you sent? Do you remember? I think pure
side of the Day. I don't remember I wrote down
everything else, but this might be the paraside of the
day site because it sounds like like this one part
(10:17):
sounds like it was written by a Midwestern exterminator. When
they're talking about anything basically can attach to anything like sandpaper, glass, paper, velcrow,
fine wire, plastic, wicker work, fabric. Yeah, just like lists
all these weird things out that I guess that they've
put a leech on and it's stuck to. That was
a great Midwestern impression. By the way, it says even
(10:40):
vertically positioned surfaces coated with vasoline are no major problem
for a leech to climb. Uh. The deal with these
teetho is that they're so sharp that it's more scalpel
like in the I mean, a leech bike can hurt
mainly in land leeches, but it's not. When you hear
like razor teeth, you think it would be super painful.
(11:02):
But they're so sharp that they really don't hurt that bad. Right. Yeah,
and let's crumble another myth here. You want to sure
leech saliva contains anesthetic myth or not? Uh? By the way,
I like that, we're myth crumblers now instead of crushers. Yeah,
that's right, I like crumbler better. Okay, cool, Um, that
(11:25):
is a myth. Awesome, Yes, another myth crumbled boom. There's
a TV show in there, I think, I think so.
It's very graphics heavy, like whenever we do the myth,
it'll just crumble away. Look a cookie. Oh that's a great,
that's great, but it will use it as a wipe
from one scene to the other. You and your wipes,
I can't wait. Go ahead and say it, Star White
(11:47):
Star wipe, the king of all wipes. Yeah, but this
crumble wipe, we really might be onto something. Uh yeah,
there is no I mean you can find textbooks that
that say that too, right, Yeah, it's it's all over
the place. There's a lot of misinformation about leeches, it
turns out, but that is one that and they do
have all sorts of cool stuff in their saliva um
(12:10):
that are amazing. They do amazing things, and we'll talk
more about those, but those are not Uh. Anesthetic is
not one of them. It's just that for the jawed leeches,
there there little semi circular denticals that they use as
circular saws are so sharp and there's they go so
um such a what's the word was the opposite of deep?
(12:33):
Oh so shallow into your skin that you you might
not feel them being there. That's what it is, right,
opposite a deep. They just can't pick one, uh, there's
also the jaw less leech. Was the other kind, which
includes the giant amazon leach, which can grow to what
like eighteen Yeah, look up a picture of these things.
(12:57):
It's it's it's horrifying. How how long think about it?
They say that your wrist to your elbow is the
same length as your foot. Have you ever heard that?
I haven't, but I'm looking and there's no way my
foot smaller than that. That's I think that's an optical illusion,
is it really? Let's just say it is. So I've got, like,
(13:18):
I wear size eleven, and I could see that being
that that would mean that a leech is actually almost
one and a half times the length. One of those
leeches is one and a half times the length of
the distance from my wrist to my elbow. Can you
imagine having one of those on you? Not on me?
But when you look up photos of the giant amazon leach,
(13:40):
all you see your pictures of people with them, like, hey,
I put it on my arm to show you how
big it is. It's yeah, it's frightening. Those are the
same people who seek out insects on the Schmidt stinging
pain index cycle. Uh, but this one, you know, I
said there were two different, equally horrifying ways in which
they can draw blood. This one doesn't have the circular
salt teeth. It has a hypodermic needle, basically a proboscis
(14:05):
that it sticks into your body and draws it out,
just like you would drawing blood. Yep, which I don't
know which is worse, the denticles, the three dentical saws,
or proboscis coming out of a leech. Can we take
a break and think about it. Yeah, let's all right,
we'll be right back. M h. What's your result? Which
(14:52):
is worse? I've decided I don't have to choose. I
think they're both terrible and awful, and I don't want
either one of them happening to me or anyone love
or care about. Oh thank you? Am I in that
group that includes you, Buddy, okay, Jerry, Jerry of course? Sure, Dave, yes,
Dave too? Who else you got? What about the other? Dave? Sure?
(15:14):
Dave Kustin, M I'm sorry, Dave Kuston, sure for sure.
Olivia Julia Layton grab grab sir Frank chair. Oh yeah, sure,
of course. Remember when he used to have our regular
guest producers just float in and out. There's Matt Noel
(15:35):
care about them too, don't want leeches on them either.
Who else guests produced us? I don't know. I'm sure
there are people out there that actually know this though.
My friend I forgot to say something at the top
of this episode, and I wonder if you can indulge
me on a tangent of epic proportions. Yes, my sweet
(15:57):
niece Mila, I think I've told you before. She's gotten
some parts of movies. The big one, her first big
one where she's like one of the main characters, is
coming out February on Hulu. It's huge. It's a big
twentieth Century Fox production called No Exit. It will be
out on Hulu on February. She does. I saw the trailer.
(16:21):
She gave me chills. She plays a kidnapped young girl
who is just terrified and has to be rescued by
a slightly older girl, Havannah Rose Lou. Wow, that's super exciting.
It is very exciting. We're all very proud, and I
wanted to make sure everybody knew about it in case
you wanted to see it in a cash calumar right,
(16:43):
yeah's rolling in it. She couldn't even drive. She's got
like a whole garage full of cars already. Wow, that
is super cool. That is awesome. Uh, my daughter is
funny and fun but like she can't act up. Tried
to see if she could. She can't. It takes a
lot more than personnel city. Like, you've got to really
have talent. It's absolutely true. It's like really tough for
(17:04):
an adult to watch a child actor most of the time.
If she does superbly well, I mean she's well, that's
what I was saying. We're all really really proud of her.
She does like actual great work in this movie. So
way to go, Mila, Way to go Milan. Uh, to
me a text when that's out so we can watch it. Okay,
I will. I'll send you the trailer too, all right,
So back to leeches. Oh yeah, definitely sending the trailer.
(17:25):
Um they are. I mean, we have fossils of leeches
from four million years ago, and they do it seems
like they can see better when they're younger. They do
have what's called simple eyes where they can kind of
see blurry, shadowy, fuzzy things. Uh, and the young uns
kind of rely on that. But I think when they
get older, I guess their eyesight either fails or they
(17:46):
just get so good at sensing vibration that they don't
really need those eyes. Yeah, I read that it's the latter.
That they they're so good at sensing vibrations. They have
little hairs on their bodies that act as century organs
so that they can they can detect like movement in
the water. And I'll tell you what, I can really
relate to leeches because after I saw my niece Mila
(18:08):
and the trailer for No Exit coming out February, the
hairs on my arm we're standing on and I could
have detected vibrations in water with those things. That is
a Hodgemen level plug. Thank you. It's good. Leeches. No, no no, no,
we don't need Leeches are amazing swimmers. Uh. They can
kind of inch along in the water very definitely. And
(18:31):
then when they hit your skin, they're gonna probably not
go towards your bits, but they will probably hit you
around the ankles or the shins or someplace and try
and do their thing down there. Because it's thin skin,
they have less to deal with. Um. So one of
the things we said that there um there, they're saliva
really does have some pretty neat compounds in it, and
(18:53):
like things that science is just now you know that
whole arrogance of science that science went through after it
was like, oh, all this is just witchcraft and folk magic.
We can't be associated with this, and they turn their
backs on some like legitimately good stuff. Leeches was one
of them, and they're just now as we'll talk about
coming back around to like really looking into leeches, because
(19:13):
they're kind of a medical marvel gift from nature itself.
And the reason why is because in its saliva it
contains a bunch of chemicals, not the least of which
is called I believe here you didn't you think I'm
pronouncing that correctly. That sounds right, I'm thinking here, you didn't.
Uh yeah, it's a and we'll talk about it more
(19:35):
in depth in a minute. But it is pretty amazing
that this thing that allows them just to feed better
because it thins the blood and it doesn't coagulate and
it just gives them dinner. It's pretty amazing that it
actually has like legitimate medical properties. Yeah, because it's so
powerful when that leech and injects some of its saliva
(19:56):
containing here you didn't in it um, like your blood
starts flowing. And one of the things you'll find is
that if you get a leech bite, once that leech
is gone, whether you get it off of yourself or
it fills up and wanders off, you're gonna still keep
bleeding for up to ten hours afterward because that here
it in is so so powerful as as far as
(20:17):
anticoagulants go. Also, so there's another compound in there. I
can't remember which one it is, but it's a vasodilator,
which means it opens up your blood vessel so that
more blood pumps out more freely. Yeah, I mean this
is a little evolutionary miracle of a of a well
it's not a bug, but slug. Yeah. Uh. They will
(20:40):
drink blood like crazy. They will drink as much as
ten times their body weight sometimes because they're a bit
like the camel of the of the lake in that
they go a year or so, sometimes many months at
least between meals and they can store this stuff up
and a little power where they have these enzymes because
(21:02):
you know, blood will eventually go bad, but they have
enzymes that protect it and keep it fresh. Yeah. And
there's another thing that they're studying with leeches these days
is it's um, it's a microbiota and its stomach and
it's gut, just like they're studying our microbiota, which I
think is the most fascinating thing of all time. They're
also setting leeches to figure out what's going on in
there to keep the blood from spoiling, because you know,
(21:25):
they might go six months or a year between meals.
It doesn't take them that long to digest it, but
it still takes weeks and weeks for a leech to
digest its its meal. And it takes long enough that,
I mean a leach probably only feeds a few times
in its life, I believe, yeah, because they don't live
that long. I mean, but I think no more than
a few years probably max. That would be my guess.
(21:47):
As well, we should talk about the tyrant king leech,
the Taranta della rex and this is a one jawed
sucker that uh is also in the Amazon River. And
these are the stuff of nightmares because this is one
of those leeches that's like, forget the ankle, forget the shin.
What I really like is to get inside of you
(22:09):
and up in that mucus membrane so it will get
into your nasal cavity. You can be a kid, and
there are many reports of kids and teenagers who were
bathing in the Amazon or playing in the Amazon and
ended up with a leech up their nose or somewhere
like deep within their nasal cavity, which is the stuff
of nightmares to me. It gets even worse than that
(22:32):
because they found these kinds of leeches in eyeballs, like
attached to the mucus membrane around your eyeball, your urethra
so so much they will block the your ability to pee,
your anus or your vagina, have one there than the
other two places, or your vagina. They found leeches in vaginas,
(22:53):
these kind of leeches. And the other worst part about them, Chuck,
is that you know a leech that's feeding on you externally,
like a typical jawed leech. It'll feed for maybe twenty
to thirty minutes something like that. These guys stick around
for weeks, maybe months, And sometimes people detect that they
have one of these internal leeches because they they they
(23:16):
feel what's called foreign body movement, like there's something moving
around inside of them and their bodies like m I
might want to get this checked out, because I'm about
to puke everything up right now. Oh man, I just
can't help but think of when I pulled that spider
out of Emily's ear cavity and she was like, it's
something like buzzing, Like that's not a good sign. Oh man,
(23:40):
that was so funny. I mean, it was funny for me,
and she handled it pretty well. I gotta say, can
we read that thing from eight thirty five since we're
just at the maybe the grossest part of this whole episode.
Uh yeah, go ahead, hit it. Do you know the
one I'm talking about? I think so? Yeah. Okay, So
there was a there was a case study that mentioned
(24:00):
on a site, a historian site called Jerry Walton dot
com g E. R. I Walton dot com, who is
a historian, and she wrote about a girl who was
gathering watercress in and there was a leech that went
around her ankle and then for some reason, the leech
made its way all the way into the girl's leg
and just climbed up to her thigh where finally her
(24:23):
thigh was about twice it's natural size, tents red and
shining and very painful. And finally the doctor like cut
out this blood clot of blood and puss, he says,
which you say, which he drained and emptied into a bowl.
On emptying the matter from the bowl on a clean
(24:43):
flag outside the door, the girl's mother was surprised to
find among it a leech, coiled up, quite alive and
moving actively. Yeah, I mean, this isn't something leeches are
known to do, like burrow and move around inside your body,
like from the skin, like they'll crawl up your nose
or if you swallow one. This um limnatis uh niloticta
(25:05):
is one of the ones that doesn't have the power
to break the skin with its little teeth or jaw,
so it it hangs around and waits for you to
drink it, or a cow to drink it, so like
they'll get in that way. But they are not known
to generally do what happened in this girl right now,
which is why a hundred and eighty five years later,
eighty seven years later, we're talking about it on stuff.
(25:27):
You should know because it is so messed up that
almost fainted when I first read it, And it takes
a lot to make me feel like I could faint
if I if I don't stop imagining like putting myself
here in this situation. Yeah, I mean that's horrifying. Um
hasn't happened a ton since then, because that was right, right, No,
it is extremely rare. And even like you said, that
(25:49):
one that will um that will like when you you'll
drink it up and it attaches um. That's actually killed.
Some people famously killed some of napoleon soldiers in Egypt
and seventeen. They drank from a water source that a leech,
some leeches attached to like their esophagus, and as they
became engorged from feeding, it blocked the soldiers airways and
(26:11):
some of them died from suffocation. Yeah, I mean, what's
probably not gonna happen almost certainly, as you're not gonna
be bled out by leeches. But there have been cases
where people have gone to the emergency room with like
more than a hundred leeches on them and they were
anemic or lightheaded or both, and so that can happen.
But you're generally not going to die from a leech, I'll,
(26:33):
you know, unless you're in Napoleon's army, right right. The
need deserved it. So you want to talk about how
leeches reproduced because that's pretty interesting as well. Sure they're hermaphroditic. Yep,
they have male and female sex organs. Uh, they are
internal sex organs, and they do make you know. They
(26:54):
have uh, they have sperm, they have eggs, they have ovaries,
and in order to mate, they get together. And I
thought we had talked about this before. It was some
insect that did something similar, probably ticks maybe, where they
attached to each other and kind of just line up
where their parts should be and the sort of fit.
(27:18):
The male produces a container like a syringe light container
of sperm called a spermataphor, and it pierces the skin
near that sex organ, and I guess they say it's
close enough for rock and roll. And they somehow find
a way to the ovaries, and then they produce these
little cocoons that are very hardy. Yeah, out of a
(27:39):
little part of their body called the clitellum. It produces
a thick fluid that the the fertilized eggs are are
enshrouded in in that cocoon. And then they attached the
cocoons to like plants or put them in the mud
or something like that. In a few weeks or months later,
um baby leeches hatch and and they just they hatch
like fully formed and just grow over time as they
(28:02):
feed um. But they they do this reciprocally. Yeah, that
was right. Where each leech fertilizes one another's eggs. So
as the leeches um mate, they are um fertilizing one
another's eggs. They're both receiving amp and sending um sperm.
(28:24):
And it's pretty neat. It's it's kind of a real
tip for ted arrangement. It is. And those cocoons are
really hardy. Dave talks about it, says that they're tough
enough to be swallowed by waterfowl and just go right
through them and come out the other end and be okay,
which gave rise to the famous saying that went through
me like a leech cocoon through a waterfowl, which is
(28:47):
what I always say. Sure, no, it was good. What
about the kangaroo leach? I think that one bears mentioning
as well too, as as far as reproduct. Yeah, they kangrew.
I mean, these things come out kind of ready to
take on the world. They don't need a lot of care,
but they are doting parents in some cases, which is
(29:08):
pretty interesting, especially the kangaroo leach, which has a little
a little pouch like a marsupial does, and they carry
around their little leech in the pouch until they're ready
to think for themselves, which is sort of adorable and
so and this definitely was from the Daily Parasite dot com,
but they said that the leech um basically shoots them
(29:30):
the pouch of baby leeches explosively onto a passing frog
when it's ready, when it says like, fly away, a
little Berris's time for you to to live on your own,
to make sure that they get a good first meal.
So some poor frog gets splattered with baby leeches because
because it happened to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time. I mean, I wonder if I know
(29:52):
what they can't kill a human? Can leech just kill
a sure fish or a frog? I think they can
kill livestock if if you don't get them off. I
think one of the reasons they have trouble killing humans
is because we have opposable thumbs, and we can get
them off. We can get them off a lot easily easier.
I read that poor elephants will will be driven like
almost crazy when a leech gets up inside of its
(30:13):
trunk like, and I thought, yeah, there's a lot of
like animals are just s o l in a lot
of cases. So yeah, I think they can think they
can kill animals because they can't get them off as easy.
Poor elephants. I know, I feel sucking that water up
have been fun mhmm, very sad. So I say we talk.
We we give everybody, the good people, some advice about
(30:35):
how to get rid of a leech if you find
one on you, and then let's take a break hop
about that. Yeah, like I said, you don't need to
be too freaked out, even though it's pretty scary looking.
They're not poisonous, you're not. They don't carry or they
haven't at least been known to carry um human blood
born diseases. Yeah, anytime there's like a blood sucker, you
kind of might want to worry about that, but not
(30:56):
in this case. But what you want to do is
don't panic and just tear it off of you because
it might detaching, part of it might get left kind
of like a tick. Again, you don't want any of
it left in your skin, right right, because that that
remnant usually the jaw can get infected um. And another
one that you want to do is you don't want
(31:16):
to treat it too rough, like you might want to
beat it up and and um and really show it
who's boss, but you don't. You want to treat it
very gently because if you like squeeze a leech or
a lot of people recommend putting a little table salt
or even like alcohol or lemon juice on a leech,
if you disturb it biologically like they're physiologically like that,
(31:38):
you might make it vomit. And that's bad because it's
vomiting up some of its stomach contents into your body
and you can get an infection from that as well.
So the key here is to treat the leech very
gently and go against every fiber of your screaming nerves
in your entire body. Will just be like, oh fiddle
(31:59):
d d there's a leech on me. I better carefully
remove it. He dial up the stuff you should know
episode and listen all the way through the thirty two
minutes until I get to the point where they tell
us to be gentle and just use a little Dave said,
like a credit card or your fingernail or something, and
gently kind of press on the side of its head,
(32:20):
hopefully it will detach that sucker. And then Dave said
to flick it off before it reattaches. And that is
an understatement. Yeah, I mean, you're just trying to break
that seal that the leech creates with its mouth and
your skin, and then enough for it to be like,
hey man, what the heck, so that it pulls its
jaws out too as well. Um, and again, that wound's
(32:43):
gonna bleed for maybe ten hours. I saw in a
Popular Science article. So just you gotta clean the wound,
you gotta dress it, and you're gonna have to redress it,
probably more than once because it's kind of just keep bleeding. Yeah.
I feel like I had a leech on me at
one point or another when I was a kid, but
nothing stands out story wise, but I'm pretty sure I
(33:05):
remember it happening. You. I don't think I've ever had
a leach on me. I've had plenty of ticks, but
never elach. Keep that street going. I'm trying what I say.
I'm trying. I steer clear of fresh water, salt water.
You don't get in the water. I don't go to
Japan or Indonesia. I'm pretty I'm steering clear of the leeches.
(33:28):
I see. That's my problem is I am one to
jump in any body of water that I can jump in.
I remember once when I was a kid and we
had this creek that we used to swim in, and
we were hanging out with some kid who didn't normally
hang out with us, and he saw the first of
us go into this creek and start swimming and he
goes that kid wants dysent terry or something like that,
(33:52):
and I mean, we're like ten. I don't know how
this kid even knew about dysent terry, but I knew
what he was talking about enough to be like, Oh,
you don't want that. You can get that from creeks.
I better steer clear of creeks. That has made a
huge impression on me. Yeah, with the creeks behind my house.
So I just I don't know. I'll always try and
get water if I can. Oh. The other thing that
scared me too in that same creek, with somebody saying
(34:14):
like what about water moccasins? Like there they always everybody
always has a story about how somebody jumped into a
pit of water moccasins, and that was that. So that
kind of steered me clear of creeks too, So you
get it, I get it, don't really regret it. All right, Well,
let's have a little pause for the cause, and we will.
Jesus just turned into Johnny fever r I P. By
(34:35):
the way, Howard Heman? What he just passed away? What
a b s year already for celebriting man. I'll tell
you who turned out to be a great person in retrospect?
Was Bob Saget. My goodness read any of the tributes
to him, pretty heartwarming. You should read. Have you read
John stamus as eulogy? Amazing dude, I think very highly
(34:59):
a Bob sagging out, but also John Steams and weirdly
John Mayer. Uh, I don't know if you were any
of that stuff. I didn't know. They were good buddies.
He wrote some John Mary a lot. She didn't like
his music, but she thinks he's pretty cool and uh yeah,
So that's how we kind of got sucked into the
whole Bob sag It death thing. Alright. And Jeffrey Ross,
who he was a really good friend of Bob. My
(35:20):
brother worked with Saga and he remember years ago saying
that he was like the nicest dude. Yeah, he's he
seems to have been the real deal for sure. Alright,
pe everybody who we've lost this year, how about that?
And that let's take a break and we're going to
talk about blood letting right after this. M okay, chuck.
(36:03):
So we're finally at part two thirty five minutes in.
What we're talking about the history of blood letting um
and using medicinal leeches and just a brief overview of
blood letting. It's based on the humoral theory of health
and disease, which says that we have four humors, right,
We've got um, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
(36:27):
And over time people said, I think bloods like the
real like money, money, humor. We need to keep things
in balance. So if you want to keep everything in
balance to be healthy, you need to get rid of
some excess blood. That's the real problem. And so for
a long time people use like knives or whatever and
cut your into your veins to to bleed you out
(36:48):
to remove some of that blood. And somewhere along the
way people said, I think leeches are a better a
better treatment for this because it's a lot gentler and
kindler than cutting into somebody's arms. Uh, and you probably
don't is nearly the amount of blood We covered this
years ago. It had to have been in one of
our weird medical top tens. And I know we talked
(37:11):
about medical leeches at some point, but here we go again,
because they used them a lot back then. Um. I
think the early nineteenth century is when in Europe they
were like, this is really the best kind of treatment
we've ever heard of. We would call that the Golden
(37:31):
Age at least so far of leeching or leech mania, yeah,
of losing blood via leach And there was a man,
specifically a doctor in Paris, Dr Francois would that be
Brusa m hm okay, And he was. He was a
physician in Paris who he basically was like, you know what,
(37:53):
everything that's wrong with anyone is inflammation of your intestines.
It all goes back to that. So anybody that comes
by my clim my military hospital, the first thing that
we're gonna do, I don't care what you say is
wrong with you, is we're going to throw fifty leeches
on your body right out of the gate. To see
what happens. Yeah, he earned the nickname le Vampierre de
(38:14):
la medicine, which seems appropriate. But he was hugely popular,
so much so that um and leeches were hugely popular too.
But the ideas of Brussay were so popular that, um,
he even reached into the fashion world where people would
wear like dresses with leeches embroidered all over him. Like
(38:34):
leech mania seems to be a really good descriptor of
this period of time. And I saw and I could
not find what happened. But Britannica said that his his
theories about blood letting and leeches were hugely influential until
a cholera epidemic in eighteen thirty two and his methods
proved disastrous and he fell out of favor. Interesting. I
(38:57):
couldn't see what happened, but you can probably guess that
a lot of people die because he mistreated them by
blood by you know, massive blood lighting or whatever. But
it seems to have ended that that leech mania thing.
And then, like we said before, um, the leeches is
kind of fell to the wayside because modern medicine was like, no,
(39:18):
that's that's claptrap, that's quackery. We need to separate ourselves
from that, even if there was really something to it. Yeah,
and if you're wondering, you know that it takes a
lot of leeches. It's not like a doctor would have
like six or eight of these laying around. Um, you know,
thirty five million medical leeches were being imported every year
into France alone in the eighteen thirties. And if you're
(39:38):
asking yourself, how do you get this many leeches? You
get him the old fashioned way. There were people like
leech I mean, Dave calls him leech gatherers or leech hunters.
They would wade into waters with their pants rolled up
or maybe no pants at all, and they would get
leeches to attach to themselves and then pull them off
(39:59):
and sell them. And yeah, and Jerry Walton's website I
saw she wrote that they would, in this manner gather
about five leeches a day. It's crazy. We're doing a
good job. It is crazy. It's very because she wrote
a whole post on leech gathering as a weird profession
that that finally kind of fellow the wayside, and it
(40:20):
did indeed fell the wayside until I think the seventies,
when some daring adventurous UH physiologists started studying what's called
herudo therapy UM, and it was it became kind of
important first in reconstructive surgery. And it just makes uttering
(40:41):
complete sense that you would use it for this. So
I guess they were starting to study it in the seventies,
but it wasn't until when a plastic surgeon name named
Joseph Upton like really put it to the test. I
get the impression it was mostly clinical or lab studies
and maybe UM just kind of posture elation. And Upton said,
I'm trying. I'm at the end of my rope. I'm
(41:04):
gonna get it is pretty amazing. There was a boy,
a five year old boy in Boston who went in
and said, my right, HEEA was bitten off in the pock.
It was dog and very sad. I'm just kind of
getting around UM. But that all ends well, don't worry.
That's the reason I'm telling that joke. UH. He reattached
(41:25):
the ear, but the tissue was suffering from necrosis. It
was starting to turn black and die because it was
swelling up with blood that couldn't go anywhere. It was
pulling up and becoming stagnant and This is a you know,
this was an ongoing and still is an ongoing issue
when you're trying to reattach a body part to get
that blood flow not just going one way but going
(41:46):
the other way. Like they can attach a major artery
to send blood to a thing, but they don't attach
all the little tiny veins that send blood back away
from it, so that chance than that risk of pooling
is always there. So this doctor Upton said, you know what,
I remember reading this, just stay with me, kid, this
crazy article about leech therapy. And he said, let's give
(42:10):
it a shot, and he ordered thirty leeches, had him
shipped overnight from Britain from a leech farm. They attached
two of them to this kid's ear and the leeches
did the work. And we're sucking that blood up enough
to where it regained its color and he made a
complete recovery. Yeah, And it did that by um that vasodilation,
(42:32):
so it improved blood flow. It kept that that blood
from um coagulating so it wasn't clotting, so it was
flowing even more smoothly um. And the leeches themselves were
pumped steadily pumping the blood out, so there wasn't any
blood to pool and turn ransom and become stagnant. So
and the veins can do amazing thing. Your blood vessels
(42:53):
do spectacular things. Whenever they they face an obstacle, they
will figure out a way to go around and grow
around and make new actions. So by using leeches, you
are giving those veins enough breathing room to kind of
figure it out themselves and reconnect and and you know,
reinstitute that kind of blood flow out of that area.
(43:13):
It's pretty spectacular. And that was like everybody just found
the closest leech and put it on their shoulder and
the leech like shook its hands on either side of
its head and triumph. So leeches kind of came back
like in a big way starting in the nineteen eighties
and science has really been taking them seriously ever since.
It's amazing. It's almost like they are meant to do this.
(43:33):
This is their one little function that can benefit humankind.
Uh so much though that in two thousand four the
FDA said medical leeches approved. Uh, it's actually approved. And
this is where I definitely remember us talking about it.
It's it's approved as a medical device. I know what
you're thinking of what we did an entire episode on maggots,
(43:56):
and they're also approved as a medical device for similar
off but really removing like dead and infected tissue. And
I wonder if that's what you're thinking about. I don't know.
Pretty amazing for both of them, though, so they are
legit medical devices. I think the actual quote from the
FDA was for the purpose of overcoming the problem of
(44:18):
venus venus congestion by creating prolonged localized bleeding. It sounds
like something Galen would have written. Uh, and they are
this is this sort of sad part is their single use.
So they use these leeches and then they euthanize them
an alcohol instead of I don't know, take him outside,
(44:38):
throw them in the shrubbery. Well, I mean, there's got
to be something you can do, especially if you leave
them on until they are done. It seems like, yeah,
we could kind of retire them or let them go
off and digest their meal in like a used leeches
jar or something like that. I just I think it's
sad an old folks on for leeches. Sure, at least
(45:04):
let him stay alive for the next few weeks so
that they can digest that meal and enjoy it like
this is just the worst kind of using somebody. You know. Well,
there was that one attorney, that lawyer years ago who
had a couple of leeches that that he said, uh
saved his life and he kept them in a jar
like a good guy, but he was a little wacky.
(45:26):
He actually named them and would supposedly asked their opinion
on on cases that he was handling as as a
lawyer and looking at like how they swim as some
sort of divining uh indicator of how he should uh
which direction is case should go crazy? Kind of like
(45:48):
that octopus in the World Cup. I don't know, Oh yeah, yeah,
I remember that, yeah, exactly like um and there's that
was Thomas Erskine and he there he's part of this
really interesting article from j Store Daily by Amelia Soft
that I think rus found. That's it's really good if
you're into that, if you want to read about that
whole leech mania, because it was way more than just
(46:11):
the medical profession. It was like the whole society just
kind of revered Leach for kind of like what you said,
almost like they were intended to do this, that's how
they kind of saw it, and they really kind of
respected lee just for a while, because Yeah, but while
the medical community is legitimately using them, the wellness community
is probably over using them. Uh. There are clinics in Arizona,
(46:34):
there's some in England and other parts of the world
where their leech therapy is really far reaching and basically
saying it can help with everything from arthritis to cancer,
to carpel t Herp's to hemrhoids. Uh. I'm not sure
exactly where that treatment, how that goes, but I have
a pretty good idea. Yeah, but um, there are other
(46:56):
uses therapeutically that doctors are looking into, but they are
round me saying like, places like this you need to
be really wary of because the jury is still out
on a lot of this stuff. And I don't know
if we should go back to the you know, the
seventeenth century Europe or wherever that was, right, right, But yeah,
they do think that they're anti inflammatory properties, anti tumor properties,
(47:20):
like in those leeches saliva. It's pretty neat, so you
never know. Keep keep an ear out for for a
leech update in ten years from US. Okay, maybe ellech
will be in the Senate by then. There's already a
few in there. I would say, hey, yo, uh, you
got anything else? Chuck? I got nothing else. Chuck's got
(47:43):
nothing else everybody, which means it's time for listener mail.
Hey guys, I no, you don't always worry about pronunciation,
but us it's different on an oft repeated phrase, and
I just can't help my self, so we're gonna allow this, Robin.
We usually don't take pronunciation emails very seriously because we
(48:07):
famously mispronounced things almost on purpose, right almost. Uh. The
Arctic Fox episode is the latest. And Josh said the
phrase gras, where he correctly left the PA silent but
incorrectly said fat graw and French is fat with a
(48:27):
silent last letter like foi gras instead of gross silent e.
But a soft C loosely sounds like grass. Doubtless you
were doing your best, but foi gras is a decidedly
different thing from a kuda grass. Okay, to teach French
(48:47):
too little people, What I generally say is that the
last letter of silence. So if there's an E that
means a consonant in front of it, isn't the last
letter and is not silent. That's the difference between PETI
and tait mm hmm with an E on the end
or not. You don't have to read my message on
the show. Please take it, dare you not to, but
(49:09):
please take the message to heart. And now back to
the adorable Arctic Fox. And that is Robin. Who is
she her? In Victoria b C. Great town, that Victoria BC. Robin,
thank you very much for that a little French lesson.
It's been many, many years since I had one. I
(49:30):
will try to remember from now on everyone says kuda
gra though everyone says it, yeah, but everybody's got it wrong,
you say, I mean, it's Americans saying you say kuda
grass at the next dinner party and prepared to be
laughed out of their yokol. I'm gonna I'm gonna try
a different one. I'm gonna say kuda Okay. That's good, okay, see,
(49:52):
and just just make everyone if you want to get
in touch with us, like Robin did with a little
French lesson, the little Italian lesson, who knows some other
kind of lesson, We don't care. We want to hear it.
You can send it to us via email at Stuff
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know
(50:13):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
My heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. And this is the
leeches episode that we've all been waiting for for about
a million years. Yeah, this is I love this kind
(00:23):
of stuff though, because there's the general you know, stuff
you should know, classic bug slash animal kind of show. Okay,
got it, but then you got your whole second half
of the episode, which is super interesting. Yep. I mean
the other stuff is interesting too, but you know what
I mean, it's a it's a I know, it's a
(00:44):
basically a perfect stuff you should Know episode. Dave Ruce
called it a S Y s K softball as if too,
as if to say that he couldn't have gotten it wrong.
It was just too great of a stuff you should
know topic. Yeah, he did a great job, though, always does.
He did great Yep. So we're talking leeches, and I
think Chuck this actually this episode was inspired by our
(01:05):
dentistry episode where we talked about using medical leeches for
dentistry all the way up until like the nineteen teens.
I think leeches on the gums not a pleasant thought, no,
And it sounds bonkers and wacky um and repulsive, but
they have come back into fashion in some medical circles,
(01:25):
and not just like new ag circles, like actual medical circles.
So it's like you said, we're gonna make this kind
of a two parter in a one one episode, let's
do it. So we're talking leeches, and we should probably
start with leech biology. And if you want to know
what a leech is, uh is cousin to, you need
(01:46):
look no further than a few inches underground and some
fertile soil at our friend the earthworm, which was another
great stuff you should know episode. Yeah, that was a
really good one. But yeah, if you want to get
up close and look at a leech, which you probably
are not prone to do, uh, they are ringed, just
like our little friends the earthworm. They have thirty two
segments in their little gross looking bodies and they inch
(02:10):
along like worms stew as well. They have you know,
a head sucker up at the front and a sucker
in the rear. No jokes necessary there, Yeah, oral an
anal is it really called the anal sucker. It's also
called the anterior imposterior sucker too, and or the party
(02:31):
in the this is in the front, party in the rear. Sure,
I couldn't tell the day was joking. I figured it
was called an anal sucker, but uh yeah, they just
inch along just like an inch worm or a worm
might by expanding and contracting and using those suckers. That's right. Um.
I saw that the the oral sucker, the the anterior sucker,
(02:54):
was the one that's typically used for feeding, and that
the sucker on the rear is the one that you
us to help propel the leech forward. Um. I didn't
see definitively that it can't feed on the rear anal sucker,
but um, it's possible it can't. I did see that
it's primarily used for locomotion, So whatever science writer wrote
(03:16):
that was hedging their bets. Yeah. The other thing I
thought was interesting was land leeches, which we're not going
to talk too much about because you know, most of
the leeches that we're acquainted with you will find in
the water. But land leeches do a a tick like thing,
and they're both bloodsuckers. Like remember how ticks will attach
to a plant and then just like start snapping their
(03:37):
little lobster claws everywhere hoping something walks by. Yeah, they're like, hey,
come get me somebody. The land leach does a similar
thing and attaches the rear sucker to a branch or
a leaf or something and then just sort of does
a little shimmy shake with her head, hoping that something
will walk by so it can just stick its little
face into it. It's just there in chimmys and it's like,
(03:58):
you'd like this, huh, you'd like that, Come get it.
And they're both bloodsuckers, and they both do very desperate
things to attach to a body. I know they also
un I know tis Yeah, I know. Ticks and leeches
both also share the trait of um being able to
um detect c O two as a way to detect prey,
(04:20):
at least the land leeches too. So yeah, that definitely
stuck out to me as well. UM. And I feel
like there's some really great myths out there on the
Internet that we're gonna get to just um crush, crumble
myth crushers. Yeah, that's perfect myth. We're gonna crush those myths, um.
And one of them is that leeches have thirty two brains,
which is definitively false. No, they have thirty two body segments.
(04:45):
And you will see people on the internet that say
they have a brain in each segment, but they don't.
They have to brains, one up front and one in
the back, and like a lot of little critters that
can be cut off and still function. You can cut
their brain off and they can survive and do quite well. Yeah.
The reason that people say thirty two brains, by the way,
(05:08):
that's what Google says. If you just type in leech brain,
it serves you up leech has thirty two brains. There's ganglia,
which are basically relay stations between these two brains in
each of the segment, and those segments can those ganglia
can make each segment function autonomously and be responsible for
(05:28):
some other stuff. So that's why people are like, yeah,
each one's a brain, but it's it's really not. It's
not each a brain. It's just kind of like an extended,
stretched out segmented brain. Yeah, but they're notren't thirty two
ganglia either, right, The ones on each end are kind
of fused together, so there's twenty one total. Yeah, that's
that's what I saw. See that the computers are all wrong. Yeah,
(05:51):
Google's got it wrong again. It's the computer, right. Sure,
it sounds like, Wow, I'm really getting old. The computer
is wrong. Yeah, it's you sound like somebody who like
types under the keyboard like this, right, computers wrong? Remember
what I said to you, like fourteen years ago before
(06:13):
we were even podcast hos, I remember what I say.
You pay me the high compliment of saying that when
I type, I type very loudly, especially when I'm into it,
that it sounds like the loneous monk away. I can't
believe you remember that. Oh yeah, it was a very
high compliment as far as I took it, like I
had a tattooed on my arm bit, my inner arm bit,
(06:37):
and I made you me get the same type. She's like,
it doesn't make sense, but I love you. Uh so.
Leech species are about six to seven hundred of them,
and they generally fall into three categories depending on what
they eat. Um because you know, we know they're blood suckers,
but not all of them are exclusively blood suckers. No,
(07:01):
And if they're blood suckers, they are called two of
the greatest words. Take your pick, uh sanguivorous or hamado
fadgis either way, it means that they subsist on blood.
They're not. They don't want any of your skin or
your flesh, or your muscles or great steak. They just
want the blood. But yeah, like you said, not all
of them are are blood suckers. There's some called worm
(07:22):
leeches that eat an entire invertebrates, very very small invertebrates.
But they they don't they don't really care about the
blood or else they're they're not just interested in the blood.
But most leeches, as far as we as as we
think of leeches, are sanguivorous. Yeah, but the other two
categories are pretty horrifying. And how they get their blood
(07:42):
out It's like one sounds really bad and then the
next one doesn't sound much better. Kind of thing. Uh.
The jawed leeches the one that we're most uh commonly,
you know, when you're when you're watching stand by me
and poor little Will wheat and gets a leech on
his pp Which, now that we've seen that, and now
that I should say, now that we've researched this, they
(08:03):
got it so wrong. Those kids really did it wrong
when they remove the leeches, Oh for sure, and it's
probably unlikely that that leech would have made his way
to its pp that quickly. Yeah, you never know. I
heard they do like kind of a warm, secluded area
to do their work. Will Eaton used to listen to
(08:24):
the show. I wonder I doubt if he still does.
Oh shout out to two thousand ten. Will He's like,
quit talking about my BP. But that's the jawed leech,
the one that you know, the one that's kind of
the most common and most familiar with. And it's we're
gonna talk about medicinal leeches later. That's what they use there.
But these things will feed on almost anything that they
(08:47):
can latch onto that has blood. Um, mammals, frogs, birds, fish,
basically anything that can get a hold of that has
blood it will latch onto. They strongly prefer mammals, though
the rest of this stuff is just kind of junk
food basically formed from where I can tell. Can we
talk just for a second about how the jawed leeches, um,
(09:08):
how they do their thing. Yeah, with those little razor
sharp teeth, let's do it. It's scary. So they have
like if you look at a picture of a jawed
leech mouth, everybody says it looks like a Mercedes emblem,
and and it does. There's really no better way to
put it. But if you zoom in closer, there's a
bunch of little teeth on there right called denticles, and
they act as like circular saws. So like the leech
(09:31):
itself starts making this kind of sucking motion or inhale
exhale really quickly and creates us like suction within its
body cavity. So when it's when it puts its lips
on you, it actually creates suction. And then when it
uses those little denticles that act as like little circular saws,
it just keeps sawing deeper and deeper into your skin,
finally reaching a blood vessel. When it strikes gold, red gold,
(09:55):
which you and I would call blood, it just sucks
out into the leach because it's created a vacuum pump. Yeah,
and I love this. Where did you get this, uh
that that you sent? Do you remember? I think pure
side of the Day. I don't remember I wrote down
everything else, but this might be the paraside of the
day site because it sounds like like this one part
(10:17):
sounds like it was written by a Midwestern exterminator. When
they're talking about anything basically can attach to anything like sandpaper, glass, paper, velcrow,
fine wire, plastic, wicker work, fabric. Yeah, just like lists
all these weird things out that I guess that they've
put a leech on and it's stuck to. That was
a great Midwestern impression. By the way, it says even
(10:40):
vertically positioned surfaces coated with vasoline are no major problem
for a leech to climb. Uh. The deal with these
teetho is that they're so sharp that it's more scalpel
like in the I mean, a leech bike can hurt
mainly in land leeches, but it's not. When you hear
like razor teeth, you think it would be super painful.
(11:02):
But they're so sharp that they really don't hurt that bad. Right. Yeah,
and let's crumble another myth here. You want to sure
leech saliva contains anesthetic myth or not? Uh? By the way,
I like that, we're myth crumblers now instead of crushers. Yeah,
that's right, I like crumbler better. Okay, cool, Um, that
(11:25):
is a myth. Awesome, Yes, another myth crumbled boom. There's
a TV show in there, I think, I think so.
It's very graphics heavy, like whenever we do the myth,
it'll just crumble away. Look a cookie. Oh that's a great,
that's great, but it will use it as a wipe
from one scene to the other. You and your wipes,
I can't wait. Go ahead and say it, Star White
(11:47):
Star wipe, the king of all wipes. Yeah, but this
crumble wipe, we really might be onto something. Uh yeah,
there is no I mean you can find textbooks that
that say that too, right, Yeah, it's it's all over
the place. There's a lot of misinformation about leeches, it
turns out, but that is one that and they do
have all sorts of cool stuff in their saliva um
(12:10):
that are amazing. They do amazing things, and we'll talk
more about those, but those are not Uh. Anesthetic is
not one of them. It's just that for the jawed leeches,
there there little semi circular denticals that they use as
circular saws are so sharp and there's they go so
um such a what's the word was the opposite of deep?
(12:33):
Oh so shallow into your skin that you you might
not feel them being there. That's what it is, right,
opposite a deep. They just can't pick one, uh, there's
also the jaw less leech. Was the other kind, which
includes the giant amazon leach, which can grow to what
like eighteen Yeah, look up a picture of these things.
(12:57):
It's it's it's horrifying. How how long think about it?
They say that your wrist to your elbow is the
same length as your foot. Have you ever heard that?
I haven't, but I'm looking and there's no way my
foot smaller than that. That's I think that's an optical illusion,
is it really? Let's just say it is. So I've got, like,
(13:18):
I wear size eleven, and I could see that being
that that would mean that a leech is actually almost
one and a half times the length. One of those
leeches is one and a half times the length of
the distance from my wrist to my elbow. Can you
imagine having one of those on you? Not on me?
But when you look up photos of the giant amazon leach,
(13:40):
all you see your pictures of people with them, like, hey,
I put it on my arm to show you how
big it is. It's yeah, it's frightening. Those are the
same people who seek out insects on the Schmidt stinging
pain index cycle. Uh, but this one, you know, I
said there were two different, equally horrifying ways in which
they can draw blood. This one doesn't have the circular
salt teeth. It has a hypodermic needle, basically a proboscis
(14:05):
that it sticks into your body and draws it out,
just like you would drawing blood. Yep, which I don't
know which is worse, the denticles, the three dentical saws,
or proboscis coming out of a leech. Can we take
a break and think about it. Yeah, let's all right,
we'll be right back. M h. What's your result? Which
(14:52):
is worse? I've decided I don't have to choose. I
think they're both terrible and awful, and I don't want
either one of them happening to me or anyone love
or care about. Oh thank you? Am I in that
group that includes you, Buddy, okay, Jerry, Jerry of course? Sure, Dave, yes,
Dave too? Who else you got? What about the other? Dave? Sure?
(15:14):
Dave Kustin, M I'm sorry, Dave Kuston, sure for sure.
Olivia Julia Layton grab grab sir Frank chair. Oh yeah, sure,
of course. Remember when he used to have our regular
guest producers just float in and out. There's Matt Noel
(15:35):
care about them too, don't want leeches on them either.
Who else guests produced us? I don't know. I'm sure
there are people out there that actually know this though.
My friend I forgot to say something at the top
of this episode, and I wonder if you can indulge
me on a tangent of epic proportions. Yes, my sweet
(15:57):
niece Mila, I think I've told you before. She's gotten
some parts of movies. The big one, her first big
one where she's like one of the main characters, is
coming out February on Hulu. It's huge. It's a big
twentieth Century Fox production called No Exit. It will be
out on Hulu on February. She does. I saw the trailer.
(16:21):
She gave me chills. She plays a kidnapped young girl
who is just terrified and has to be rescued by
a slightly older girl, Havannah Rose Lou. Wow, that's super exciting.
It is very exciting. We're all very proud, and I
wanted to make sure everybody knew about it in case
you wanted to see it in a cash calumar right,
(16:43):
yeah's rolling in it. She couldn't even drive. She's got
like a whole garage full of cars already. Wow, that
is super cool. That is awesome. Uh, my daughter is
funny and fun but like she can't act up. Tried
to see if she could. She can't. It takes a
lot more than personnel city. Like, you've got to really
have talent. It's absolutely true. It's like really tough for
(17:04):
an adult to watch a child actor most of the time.
If she does superbly well, I mean she's well, that's
what I was saying. We're all really really proud of her.
She does like actual great work in this movie. So
way to go, Mila, Way to go Milan. Uh, to
me a text when that's out so we can watch it. Okay,
I will. I'll send you the trailer too, all right,
So back to leeches. Oh yeah, definitely sending the trailer.
(17:25):
Um they are. I mean, we have fossils of leeches
from four million years ago, and they do it seems
like they can see better when they're younger. They do
have what's called simple eyes where they can kind of
see blurry, shadowy, fuzzy things. Uh, and the young uns
kind of rely on that. But I think when they
get older, I guess their eyesight either fails or they
(17:46):
just get so good at sensing vibration that they don't
really need those eyes. Yeah, I read that it's the latter.
That they they're so good at sensing vibrations. They have
little hairs on their bodies that act as century organs
so that they can they can detect like movement in
the water. And I'll tell you what, I can really
relate to leeches because after I saw my niece Mila
(18:08):
and the trailer for No Exit coming out February, the
hairs on my arm we're standing on and I could
have detected vibrations in water with those things. That is
a Hodgemen level plug. Thank you. It's good. Leeches. No, no no, no,
we don't need Leeches are amazing swimmers. Uh. They can
kind of inch along in the water very definitely. And
(18:31):
then when they hit your skin, they're gonna probably not
go towards your bits, but they will probably hit you
around the ankles or the shins or someplace and try
and do their thing down there. Because it's thin skin,
they have less to deal with. Um. So one of
the things we said that there um there, they're saliva
really does have some pretty neat compounds in it, and
(18:53):
like things that science is just now you know that
whole arrogance of science that science went through after it
was like, oh, all this is just witchcraft and folk magic.
We can't be associated with this, and they turn their
backs on some like legitimately good stuff. Leeches was one
of them, and they're just now as we'll talk about
coming back around to like really looking into leeches, because
(19:13):
they're kind of a medical marvel gift from nature itself.
And the reason why is because in its saliva it
contains a bunch of chemicals, not the least of which
is called I believe here you didn't you think I'm
pronouncing that correctly. That sounds right, I'm thinking here, you didn't.
Uh yeah, it's a and we'll talk about it more
(19:35):
in depth in a minute. But it is pretty amazing
that this thing that allows them just to feed better
because it thins the blood and it doesn't coagulate and
it just gives them dinner. It's pretty amazing that it
actually has like legitimate medical properties. Yeah, because it's so
powerful when that leech and injects some of its saliva
(19:56):
containing here you didn't in it um, like your blood
starts flowing. And one of the things you'll find is
that if you get a leech bite, once that leech
is gone, whether you get it off of yourself or
it fills up and wanders off, you're gonna still keep
bleeding for up to ten hours afterward because that here
it in is so so powerful as as far as
(20:17):
anticoagulants go. Also, so there's another compound in there. I
can't remember which one it is, but it's a vasodilator,
which means it opens up your blood vessel so that
more blood pumps out more freely. Yeah, I mean this
is a little evolutionary miracle of a of a well
it's not a bug, but slug. Yeah. Uh. They will
(20:40):
drink blood like crazy. They will drink as much as
ten times their body weight sometimes because they're a bit
like the camel of the of the lake in that
they go a year or so, sometimes many months at
least between meals and they can store this stuff up
and a little power where they have these enzymes because
(21:02):
you know, blood will eventually go bad, but they have
enzymes that protect it and keep it fresh. Yeah. And
there's another thing that they're studying with leeches these days
is it's um, it's a microbiota and its stomach and
it's gut, just like they're studying our microbiota, which I
think is the most fascinating thing of all time. They're
also setting leeches to figure out what's going on in
there to keep the blood from spoiling, because you know,
(21:25):
they might go six months or a year between meals.
It doesn't take them that long to digest it, but
it still takes weeks and weeks for a leech to
digest its its meal. And it takes long enough that,
I mean a leach probably only feeds a few times
in its life, I believe, yeah, because they don't live
that long. I mean, but I think no more than
a few years probably max. That would be my guess.
(21:47):
As well, we should talk about the tyrant king leech,
the Taranta della rex and this is a one jawed
sucker that uh is also in the Amazon River. And
these are the stuff of nightmares because this is one
of those leeches that's like, forget the ankle, forget the shin.
What I really like is to get inside of you
(22:09):
and up in that mucus membrane so it will get
into your nasal cavity. You can be a kid, and
there are many reports of kids and teenagers who were
bathing in the Amazon or playing in the Amazon and
ended up with a leech up their nose or somewhere
like deep within their nasal cavity, which is the stuff
of nightmares to me. It gets even worse than that
(22:32):
because they found these kinds of leeches in eyeballs, like
attached to the mucus membrane around your eyeball, your urethra
so so much they will block the your ability to pee,
your anus or your vagina, have one there than the
other two places, or your vagina. They found leeches in vaginas,
(22:53):
these kind of leeches. And the other worst part about them, Chuck,
is that you know a leech that's feeding on you externally,
like a typical jawed leech. It'll feed for maybe twenty
to thirty minutes something like that. These guys stick around
for weeks, maybe months, And sometimes people detect that they
have one of these internal leeches because they they they
(23:16):
feel what's called foreign body movement, like there's something moving
around inside of them and their bodies like m I
might want to get this checked out, because I'm about
to puke everything up right now. Oh man, I just
can't help but think of when I pulled that spider
out of Emily's ear cavity and she was like, it's
something like buzzing, Like that's not a good sign. Oh man,
(23:40):
that was so funny. I mean, it was funny for me,
and she handled it pretty well. I gotta say, can
we read that thing from eight thirty five since we're
just at the maybe the grossest part of this whole episode.
Uh yeah, go ahead, hit it. Do you know the
one I'm talking about? I think so? Yeah. Okay, So
there was a there was a case study that mentioned
(24:00):
on a site, a historian site called Jerry Walton dot
com g E. R. I Walton dot com, who is
a historian, and she wrote about a girl who was
gathering watercress in and there was a leech that went
around her ankle and then for some reason, the leech
made its way all the way into the girl's leg
and just climbed up to her thigh where finally her
(24:23):
thigh was about twice it's natural size, tents red and
shining and very painful. And finally the doctor like cut
out this blood clot of blood and puss, he says,
which you say, which he drained and emptied into a bowl.
On emptying the matter from the bowl on a clean
(24:43):
flag outside the door, the girl's mother was surprised to
find among it a leech, coiled up, quite alive and
moving actively. Yeah, I mean, this isn't something leeches are
known to do, like burrow and move around inside your body,
like from the skin, like they'll crawl up your nose
or if you swallow one. This um limnatis uh niloticta
(25:05):
is one of the ones that doesn't have the power
to break the skin with its little teeth or jaw,
so it it hangs around and waits for you to
drink it, or a cow to drink it, so like
they'll get in that way. But they are not known
to generally do what happened in this girl right now,
which is why a hundred and eighty five years later,
eighty seven years later, we're talking about it on stuff.
(25:27):
You should know because it is so messed up that
almost fainted when I first read it, And it takes
a lot to make me feel like I could faint
if I if I don't stop imagining like putting myself
here in this situation. Yeah, I mean that's horrifying. Um
hasn't happened a ton since then, because that was right, right, No,
it is extremely rare. And even like you said, that
(25:49):
one that will um that will like when you you'll
drink it up and it attaches um. That's actually killed.
Some people famously killed some of napoleon soldiers in Egypt
and seventeen. They drank from a water source that a leech,
some leeches attached to like their esophagus, and as they
became engorged from feeding, it blocked the soldiers airways and
(26:11):
some of them died from suffocation. Yeah, I mean, what's
probably not gonna happen almost certainly, as you're not gonna
be bled out by leeches. But there have been cases
where people have gone to the emergency room with like
more than a hundred leeches on them and they were
anemic or lightheaded or both, and so that can happen.
But you're generally not going to die from a leech, I'll,
(26:33):
you know, unless you're in Napoleon's army, right right. The
need deserved it. So you want to talk about how
leeches reproduced because that's pretty interesting as well. Sure they're hermaphroditic. Yep,
they have male and female sex organs. Uh, they are
internal sex organs, and they do make you know. They
(26:54):
have uh, they have sperm, they have eggs, they have ovaries,
and in order to mate, they get together. And I
thought we had talked about this before. It was some
insect that did something similar, probably ticks maybe, where they
attached to each other and kind of just line up
where their parts should be and the sort of fit.
(27:18):
The male produces a container like a syringe light container
of sperm called a spermataphor, and it pierces the skin
near that sex organ, and I guess they say it's
close enough for rock and roll. And they somehow find
a way to the ovaries, and then they produce these
little cocoons that are very hardy. Yeah, out of a
(27:39):
little part of their body called the clitellum. It produces
a thick fluid that the the fertilized eggs are are
enshrouded in in that cocoon. And then they attached the
cocoons to like plants or put them in the mud
or something like that. In a few weeks or months later,
um baby leeches hatch and and they just they hatch
like fully formed and just grow over time as they
(28:02):
feed um. But they they do this reciprocally. Yeah, that
was right. Where each leech fertilizes one another's eggs. So
as the leeches um mate, they are um fertilizing one
another's eggs. They're both receiving amp and sending um sperm.
(28:24):
And it's pretty neat. It's it's kind of a real
tip for ted arrangement. It is. And those cocoons are
really hardy. Dave talks about it, says that they're tough
enough to be swallowed by waterfowl and just go right
through them and come out the other end and be okay,
which gave rise to the famous saying that went through
me like a leech cocoon through a waterfowl, which is
(28:47):
what I always say. Sure, no, it was good. What
about the kangaroo leach? I think that one bears mentioning
as well too, as as far as reproduct. Yeah, they kangrew.
I mean, these things come out kind of ready to
take on the world. They don't need a lot of care,
but they are doting parents in some cases, which is
(29:08):
pretty interesting, especially the kangaroo leach, which has a little
a little pouch like a marsupial does, and they carry
around their little leech in the pouch until they're ready
to think for themselves, which is sort of adorable and
so and this definitely was from the Daily Parasite dot com,
but they said that the leech um basically shoots them
(29:30):
the pouch of baby leeches explosively onto a passing frog
when it's ready, when it says like, fly away, a
little Berris's time for you to to live on your own,
to make sure that they get a good first meal.
So some poor frog gets splattered with baby leeches because
because it happened to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time. I mean, I wonder if I know
(29:52):
what they can't kill a human? Can leech just kill
a sure fish or a frog? I think they can
kill livestock if if you don't get them off. I
think one of the reasons they have trouble killing humans
is because we have opposable thumbs, and we can get
them off. We can get them off a lot easily easier.
I read that poor elephants will will be driven like
almost crazy when a leech gets up inside of its
(30:13):
trunk like, and I thought, yeah, there's a lot of
like animals are just s o l in a lot
of cases. So yeah, I think they can think they
can kill animals because they can't get them off as easy.
Poor elephants. I know, I feel sucking that water up
have been fun mhmm, very sad. So I say we talk.
We we give everybody, the good people, some advice about
(30:35):
how to get rid of a leech if you find
one on you, and then let's take a break hop
about that. Yeah, like I said, you don't need to
be too freaked out, even though it's pretty scary looking.
They're not poisonous, you're not. They don't carry or they
haven't at least been known to carry um human blood
born diseases. Yeah, anytime there's like a blood sucker, you
kind of might want to worry about that, but not
(30:56):
in this case. But what you want to do is
don't panic and just tear it off of you because
it might detaching, part of it might get left kind
of like a tick. Again, you don't want any of
it left in your skin, right right, because that that
remnant usually the jaw can get infected um. And another
one that you want to do is you don't want
(31:16):
to treat it too rough, like you might want to
beat it up and and um and really show it
who's boss, but you don't. You want to treat it
very gently because if you like squeeze a leech or
a lot of people recommend putting a little table salt
or even like alcohol or lemon juice on a leech,
if you disturb it biologically like they're physiologically like that,
(31:38):
you might make it vomit. And that's bad because it's
vomiting up some of its stomach contents into your body
and you can get an infection from that as well.
So the key here is to treat the leech very
gently and go against every fiber of your screaming nerves
in your entire body. Will just be like, oh fiddle
(31:59):
d d there's a leech on me. I better carefully
remove it. He dial up the stuff you should know
episode and listen all the way through the thirty two
minutes until I get to the point where they tell
us to be gentle and just use a little Dave said,
like a credit card or your fingernail or something, and
gently kind of press on the side of its head,
(32:20):
hopefully it will detach that sucker. And then Dave said
to flick it off before it reattaches. And that is
an understatement. Yeah, I mean, you're just trying to break
that seal that the leech creates with its mouth and
your skin, and then enough for it to be like,
hey man, what the heck, so that it pulls its
jaws out too as well. Um, and again, that wound's
(32:43):
gonna bleed for maybe ten hours. I saw in a
Popular Science article. So just you gotta clean the wound,
you gotta dress it, and you're gonna have to redress it,
probably more than once because it's kind of just keep bleeding. Yeah.
I feel like I had a leech on me at
one point or another when I was a kid, but
nothing stands out story wise, but I'm pretty sure I
(33:05):
remember it happening. You. I don't think I've ever had
a leach on me. I've had plenty of ticks, but
never elach. Keep that street going. I'm trying what I say.
I'm trying. I steer clear of fresh water, salt water.
You don't get in the water. I don't go to
Japan or Indonesia. I'm pretty I'm steering clear of the leeches.
(33:28):
I see. That's my problem is I am one to
jump in any body of water that I can jump in.
I remember once when I was a kid and we
had this creek that we used to swim in, and
we were hanging out with some kid who didn't normally
hang out with us, and he saw the first of
us go into this creek and start swimming and he
goes that kid wants dysent terry or something like that,
(33:52):
and I mean, we're like ten. I don't know how
this kid even knew about dysent terry, but I knew
what he was talking about enough to be like, Oh,
you don't want that. You can get that from creeks.
I better steer clear of creeks. That has made a
huge impression on me. Yeah, with the creeks behind my house.
So I just I don't know. I'll always try and
get water if I can. Oh. The other thing that
scared me too in that same creek, with somebody saying
(34:14):
like what about water moccasins? Like there they always everybody
always has a story about how somebody jumped into a
pit of water moccasins, and that was that. So that
kind of steered me clear of creeks too, So you
get it, I get it, don't really regret it. All right, Well,
let's have a little pause for the cause, and we will.
Jesus just turned into Johnny fever r I P. By
(34:35):
the way, Howard Heman? What he just passed away? What
a b s year already for celebriting man. I'll tell
you who turned out to be a great person in retrospect?
Was Bob Saget. My goodness read any of the tributes
to him, pretty heartwarming. You should read. Have you read
John stamus as eulogy? Amazing dude, I think very highly
(34:59):
a Bob sagging out, but also John Steams and weirdly
John Mayer. Uh, I don't know if you were any
of that stuff. I didn't know. They were good buddies.
He wrote some John Mary a lot. She didn't like
his music, but she thinks he's pretty cool and uh yeah,
So that's how we kind of got sucked into the
whole Bob sag It death thing. Alright. And Jeffrey Ross,
who he was a really good friend of Bob. My
(35:20):
brother worked with Saga and he remember years ago saying
that he was like the nicest dude. Yeah, he's he
seems to have been the real deal for sure. Alright,
pe everybody who we've lost this year, how about that?
And that let's take a break and we're going to
talk about blood letting right after this. M okay, chuck.
(36:03):
So we're finally at part two thirty five minutes in.
What we're talking about the history of blood letting um
and using medicinal leeches and just a brief overview of
blood letting. It's based on the humoral theory of health
and disease, which says that we have four humors, right,
We've got um, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
(36:27):
And over time people said, I think bloods like the
real like money, money, humor. We need to keep things
in balance. So if you want to keep everything in
balance to be healthy, you need to get rid of
some excess blood. That's the real problem. And so for
a long time people use like knives or whatever and
cut your into your veins to to bleed you out
(36:48):
to remove some of that blood. And somewhere along the
way people said, I think leeches are a better a
better treatment for this because it's a lot gentler and
kindler than cutting into somebody's arms. Uh, and you probably
don't is nearly the amount of blood We covered this
years ago. It had to have been in one of
our weird medical top tens. And I know we talked
(37:11):
about medical leeches at some point, but here we go again,
because they used them a lot back then. Um. I
think the early nineteenth century is when in Europe they
were like, this is really the best kind of treatment
we've ever heard of. We would call that the Golden
(37:31):
Age at least so far of leeching or leech mania, yeah,
of losing blood via leach And there was a man,
specifically a doctor in Paris, Dr Francois would that be
Brusa m hm okay, And he was. He was a
physician in Paris who he basically was like, you know what,
(37:53):
everything that's wrong with anyone is inflammation of your intestines.
It all goes back to that. So anybody that comes
by my clim my military hospital, the first thing that
we're gonna do, I don't care what you say is
wrong with you, is we're going to throw fifty leeches
on your body right out of the gate. To see
what happens. Yeah, he earned the nickname le Vampierre de
(38:14):
la medicine, which seems appropriate. But he was hugely popular,
so much so that um and leeches were hugely popular too.
But the ideas of Brussay were so popular that, um,
he even reached into the fashion world where people would
wear like dresses with leeches embroidered all over him. Like
(38:34):
leech mania seems to be a really good descriptor of
this period of time. And I saw and I could
not find what happened. But Britannica said that his his
theories about blood letting and leeches were hugely influential until
a cholera epidemic in eighteen thirty two and his methods
proved disastrous and he fell out of favor. Interesting. I
(38:57):
couldn't see what happened, but you can probably guess that
a lot of people die because he mistreated them by
blood by you know, massive blood lighting or whatever. But
it seems to have ended that that leech mania thing.
And then, like we said before, um, the leeches is
kind of fell to the wayside because modern medicine was like, no,
(39:18):
that's that's claptrap, that's quackery. We need to separate ourselves
from that, even if there was really something to it. Yeah,
and if you're wondering, you know that it takes a
lot of leeches. It's not like a doctor would have
like six or eight of these laying around. Um, you know,
thirty five million medical leeches were being imported every year
into France alone in the eighteen thirties. And if you're
(39:38):
asking yourself, how do you get this many leeches? You
get him the old fashioned way. There were people like
leech I mean, Dave calls him leech gatherers or leech hunters.
They would wade into waters with their pants rolled up
or maybe no pants at all, and they would get
leeches to attach to themselves and then pull them off
(39:59):
and sell them. And yeah, and Jerry Walton's website I
saw she wrote that they would, in this manner gather
about five leeches a day. It's crazy. We're doing a
good job. It is crazy. It's very because she wrote
a whole post on leech gathering as a weird profession
that that finally kind of fellow the wayside, and it
(40:20):
did indeed fell the wayside until I think the seventies,
when some daring adventurous UH physiologists started studying what's called
herudo therapy UM, and it was it became kind of
important first in reconstructive surgery. And it just makes uttering
(40:41):
complete sense that you would use it for this. So
I guess they were starting to study it in the seventies,
but it wasn't until when a plastic surgeon name named
Joseph Upton like really put it to the test. I
get the impression it was mostly clinical or lab studies
and maybe UM just kind of posture elation. And Upton said,
I'm trying. I'm at the end of my rope. I'm
(41:04):
gonna get it is pretty amazing. There was a boy,
a five year old boy in Boston who went in
and said, my right, HEEA was bitten off in the pock.
It was dog and very sad. I'm just kind of
getting around UM. But that all ends well, don't worry.
That's the reason I'm telling that joke. UH. He reattached
(41:25):
the ear, but the tissue was suffering from necrosis. It
was starting to turn black and die because it was
swelling up with blood that couldn't go anywhere. It was
pulling up and becoming stagnant and This is a you know,
this was an ongoing and still is an ongoing issue
when you're trying to reattach a body part to get
that blood flow not just going one way but going
(41:46):
the other way. Like they can attach a major artery
to send blood to a thing, but they don't attach
all the little tiny veins that send blood back away
from it, so that chance than that risk of pooling
is always there. So this doctor Upton said, you know what,
I remember reading this, just stay with me, kid, this
crazy article about leech therapy. And he said, let's give
(42:10):
it a shot, and he ordered thirty leeches, had him
shipped overnight from Britain from a leech farm. They attached
two of them to this kid's ear and the leeches
did the work. And we're sucking that blood up enough
to where it regained its color and he made a
complete recovery. Yeah, And it did that by um that vasodilation,
(42:32):
so it improved blood flow. It kept that that blood
from um coagulating so it wasn't clotting, so it was
flowing even more smoothly um. And the leeches themselves were
pumped steadily pumping the blood out, so there wasn't any
blood to pool and turn ransom and become stagnant. So
and the veins can do amazing thing. Your blood vessels
(42:53):
do spectacular things. Whenever they they face an obstacle, they
will figure out a way to go around and grow
around and make new actions. So by using leeches, you
are giving those veins enough breathing room to kind of
figure it out themselves and reconnect and and you know,
reinstitute that kind of blood flow out of that area.
(43:13):
It's pretty spectacular. And that was like everybody just found
the closest leech and put it on their shoulder and
the leech like shook its hands on either side of
its head and triumph. So leeches kind of came back
like in a big way starting in the nineteen eighties
and science has really been taking them seriously ever since.
It's amazing. It's almost like they are meant to do this.
(43:33):
This is their one little function that can benefit humankind.
Uh so much though that in two thousand four the
FDA said medical leeches approved. Uh, it's actually approved. And
this is where I definitely remember us talking about it.
It's it's approved as a medical device. I know what
you're thinking of what we did an entire episode on maggots,
(43:56):
and they're also approved as a medical device for similar
off but really removing like dead and infected tissue. And
I wonder if that's what you're thinking about. I don't know.
Pretty amazing for both of them, though, so they are
legit medical devices. I think the actual quote from the
FDA was for the purpose of overcoming the problem of
(44:18):
venus venus congestion by creating prolonged localized bleeding. It sounds
like something Galen would have written. Uh, and they are
this is this sort of sad part is their single use.
So they use these leeches and then they euthanize them
an alcohol instead of I don't know, take him outside,
(44:38):
throw them in the shrubbery. Well, I mean, there's got
to be something you can do, especially if you leave
them on until they are done. It seems like, yeah,
we could kind of retire them or let them go
off and digest their meal in like a used leeches
jar or something like that. I just I think it's
sad an old folks on for leeches. Sure, at least
(45:04):
let him stay alive for the next few weeks so
that they can digest that meal and enjoy it like
this is just the worst kind of using somebody. You know. Well,
there was that one attorney, that lawyer years ago who
had a couple of leeches that that he said, uh
saved his life and he kept them in a jar
like a good guy, but he was a little wacky.
(45:26):
He actually named them and would supposedly asked their opinion
on on cases that he was handling as as a
lawyer and looking at like how they swim as some
sort of divining uh indicator of how he should uh
which direction is case should go crazy? Kind of like
(45:48):
that octopus in the World Cup. I don't know, Oh yeah, yeah,
I remember that, yeah, exactly like um and there's that
was Thomas Erskine and he there he's part of this
really interesting article from j Store Daily by Amelia Soft
that I think rus found. That's it's really good if
you're into that, if you want to read about that
whole leech mania, because it was way more than just
(46:11):
the medical profession. It was like the whole society just
kind of revered Leach for kind of like what you said,
almost like they were intended to do this, that's how
they kind of saw it, and they really kind of
respected lee just for a while, because Yeah, but while
the medical community is legitimately using them, the wellness community
is probably over using them. Uh. There are clinics in Arizona,
(46:34):
there's some in England and other parts of the world
where their leech therapy is really far reaching and basically
saying it can help with everything from arthritis to cancer,
to carpel t Herp's to hemrhoids. Uh. I'm not sure
exactly where that treatment, how that goes, but I have
a pretty good idea. Yeah, but um, there are other
(46:56):
uses therapeutically that doctors are looking into, but they are
round me saying like, places like this you need to
be really wary of because the jury is still out
on a lot of this stuff. And I don't know
if we should go back to the you know, the
seventeenth century Europe or wherever that was, right, right, But yeah,
they do think that they're anti inflammatory properties, anti tumor properties,
(47:20):
like in those leeches saliva. It's pretty neat, so you
never know. Keep keep an ear out for for a
leech update in ten years from US. Okay, maybe ellech
will be in the Senate by then. There's already a
few in there. I would say, hey, yo, uh, you
got anything else? Chuck? I got nothing else. Chuck's got
(47:43):
nothing else everybody, which means it's time for listener mail.
Hey guys, I no, you don't always worry about pronunciation,
but us it's different on an oft repeated phrase, and
I just can't help my self, so we're gonna allow this, Robin.
We usually don't take pronunciation emails very seriously because we
(48:07):
famously mispronounced things almost on purpose, right almost. Uh. The
Arctic Fox episode is the latest. And Josh said the
phrase gras, where he correctly left the PA silent but
incorrectly said fat graw and French is fat with a
(48:27):
silent last letter like foi gras instead of gross silent e.
But a soft C loosely sounds like grass. Doubtless you
were doing your best, but foi gras is a decidedly
different thing from a kuda grass. Okay, to teach French
(48:47):
too little people, What I generally say is that the
last letter of silence. So if there's an E that
means a consonant in front of it, isn't the last
letter and is not silent. That's the difference between PETI
and tait mm hmm with an E on the end
or not. You don't have to read my message on
the show. Please take it, dare you not to, but
(49:09):
please take the message to heart. And now back to
the adorable Arctic Fox. And that is Robin. Who is
she her? In Victoria b C. Great town, that Victoria BC. Robin,
thank you very much for that a little French lesson.
It's been many, many years since I had one. I
(49:30):
will try to remember from now on everyone says kuda
gra though everyone says it, yeah, but everybody's got it wrong,
you say, I mean, it's Americans saying you say kuda
grass at the next dinner party and prepared to be
laughed out of their yokol. I'm gonna I'm gonna try
a different one. I'm gonna say kuda Okay. That's good, okay, see,
(49:52):
and just just make everyone if you want to get
in touch with us, like Robin did with a little
French lesson, the little Italian lesson, who knows some other
kind of lesson, We don't care. We want to hear it.
You can send it to us via email at Stuff
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you should Know
(50:13):
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
My heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
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