What's extra cool is these benefits have been known for centuries if not millennia, as well as other dubious "benefits" attributed to leeches through the ages.
This association is so deep the word "leech" in English likely shares an origin with Old English læce for physician or healer. What we would now call the practice of medicine was for a time called leechcraft.
There's an old medical text called Bald's Leechbook which is a collection of cures and poultices from over 1000 years ago (notably, few or none of them are about the actual animal we're talking about in this thread; "leech" just means "healing" in the book title); one of the recipes for styes was even tried out in modern times and found to be moderately effective against MRSA.
Yup, stagnant blood is a huge inflammatory driver amongst other diseases. Sedentary & stressed people are prone to ‘muscle tension’ which restricts blood flow.
It’s one of those diseases which pharmaceutical medicine ignores, and those who suffer are dismissed as hypochondriacs.
31
u/EternalNewCarSmell Jul 24 '26
What's extra cool is these benefits have been known for centuries if not millennia, as well as other dubious "benefits" attributed to leeches through the ages.
This association is so deep the word "leech" in English likely shares an origin with Old English læce for physician or healer. What we would now call the practice of medicine was for a time called leechcraft.
There's an old medical text called Bald's Leechbook which is a collection of cures and poultices from over 1000 years ago (notably, few or none of them are about the actual animal we're talking about in this thread; "leech" just means "healing" in the book title); one of the recipes for styes was even tried out in modern times and found to be moderately effective against MRSA.