Sir, We read the comments “Leech therapy and Infection control: No clear window”[1] on the article “Pigment reduction in Nevus of Ota following Leech Therapy: A case report” published recently in the JAIM with great interest.[2] It is true that the present practice of Ayurveda does not have a validated or well–studied protocol for preventing infections and associated adverse events of applicati...

Unlike mammals, the CNS of the medicinal leech can regenerate damaged neurites, thus restoring neural functions. Our group recently demonstrated that the injured leech nerve cord is able to mount an immune response, which promotes the regenerative processes. This defense mechanism is microorganism-specific, suggesting that the leech CNS is able to discriminate among microbial components. We rep...

Ever since there were doctors they have had to consider the problem of telling public about medicine. For many centuries it was not really a big problem. Medicine was mostly magic. It was a mixture of Babylonian numerology, Arabian chemy, medieval horoscopy and inspired water-divining, or uromancy. Ihe profession disagreed about a lot of things. Whether seven was a better dumber than fourteen. ...

The use of leeches as a highly efficient natural medicine treatment has experienced a resurgence in human therapy, particularly in German speaking countries and the US. The number of leech treatments in Germany has amounted to about 100.000 per year. In addition to the return of diverse applications of medicinal leeches for human treatment, the leech (Hirudo medicinalis/verbana/orientalis) has ...

We investigated decision-making in the leech nervous system by stimulating identical sensory inputs that sometimes elicit crawling and other times swimming. Neuronal populations were monitored with voltage-sensitive dyes after each stimulus. By quantifying the discrimination time of each neuron, we found single neurons that discriminate before the two behaviors are evident. We used principal co...

pyoderma gangrenosum (pg) is a painful skin lesion that results from excessive inflammatory response to a host of traumatic, inflammatory, or neoplastic processes in susceptible individuals. a clear pathogenetic mechanism as well as an exhaustive list of potential triggers for pg is yet to be fully characterized. this case documents the occurrence of pyoderma gangrenosum following leech-therapy...

The Leech lattice A is a very dense packing of spheres in 24-dimensional Euclidean space, discovered by Leech (1967). Its automorphism group was determined by Conway (1969), and its usefulness as a source of codes for the Gaussian channel was studied by Blake (1971). The present note contains some comments on and corrections to the latter paper. Both Leech (1967) and Conway (1969) use essential...

One day last year on arriving at tlie Panchmar dispensary I found 'the Sub-Assistant Surgeon trying to remove a leech from tlie pharynx of an Afghan lad of fourteen. I told him to carry on while I attended to some other work and present' ly he reported that the leech had gone down into the boy's larynx. With direct sunlight and a laryngoscopic mirror I could see the leech very clearly lying on ...

Especially when combined with unique biological adaptations, invertebrate animals provide important insights into innate immunity because the immune response is not complicated by adaptive immunity that vertebrates evolved. One such example is the digestive tract of the medicinal leech, Hirudo verbana, which is unusual in two aspects, it contains a simple microbial community and it stores large...