Stuff You Should Know - Leeches: Oh Hell No!

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart 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 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. Yeah. I mean the other stuff's interesting too, but you know what I mean? It's a two-battery. Yeah, I know. It's basically a Perfect Stuff You Should Know episode. Dave Ruse called it a SYSK softball 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 dentistry episode where we talked about using medical leeches for dentistry all the way up until like the 19 teens, I think. Yeah, leeches on the gums, not a pleasant thought. No, and it sounds bonkers and wacky and repulsive, but they have come back into fashion in some medical circles and not just like new-agey circles, like actual medical circles.

So it's like you said, we're going to make this kind of a two-parter in a 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 cousin to, you need look no further than a few inches underground in some fertile soil at our friend the earthworm, which is 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, they are ringed just like our little friends at the

earthworm. They have 32 segments in their little gross looking bodies. And they inch along like worms do 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 and anal. Is it really called the anal sucker? It's also called the anterior and posterior sucker too. And or the party in the business in the front party in the rear? Sure. I couldn't tell if Dave was joking. I figured it was called an anal sucker, but

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. I saw that the oral sucker, the anterior sucker was the one that's typically used for feeding and that the sucker on the rear is the one that's used to help propel the leech forward. I didn't see definitively that it can't feed on the rear anal sucker, but it's possible it can't. I did see that it's primarily used for locomotion. So whatever science writer wrote, 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 most of the leeches that we're acquainted with, you'll find in the water, but land leeches do a tick like thing and they're both blood suckers. Remember how ticks will attach to a plant and then just start snapping their little lobster claws everywhere, hoping something walks by? Yeah, they're like, hey, come get me somebody. The land leech does a similar thing and attaches the rear sucker to a branch or a leaf or something and then just sort of just a little shimmy shake with their head, hoping that something will walk by so it can just stick its little face into it. It's just they're in shimmies and it's like,

you like this, huh? You like that? Come get it. And they're both blood suckers and they both do very desperate things to attach to a body. I know. They also tick... To turn off. I know. Yeah, I know. Ticks and leeches both also share the trait of being able to detect CO2 as a way to detect prey, at least the land leeches too. So yeah, that definitely stuck out to me as well. And I feel like there's some really great myths out there on the internet that we're

going to get to just crush, crumble. Myth crushers. Yeah, that's perfect. We're going to crush those myths. And one of them is that leeches have 32 brains, which is definitively false. No, they have 32 body segments and you will see people on the internet that say they have a brain in each segment, but they don't. They have two 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 32 brains, by the way, that's what Google says. If you just type in leech brain, it serves you up. Leech has 32 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 some other stuff. So that's why people are like, yeah, each one's a brain, but 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 not 32 ganglia either, right? The ones on each end are kind of fused together. So there's 21 total. Yeah, that's what I saw.

See that the computers are all wrong. Yeah, Google's got it wrong again. It's the computer, right? Sure. It sounds like some, wow, I'm really getting old. The computer's wrong. Yeah, it's, you sound like somebody who like types under the keyboard like this. Right. Hey, you're the loud type. The computer's wrong. Remember what I said to you like 14 years ago before we were even a podcast host? I remember. What'd I say? You paid 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 loneliest monk jamming 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 it tattooed on my armpit, my inner armpit. And I made Yumi get the same tattoo too. She's like, it doesn't make sense, but I love you. So leech species are about six to seven hundred of them, and they generally fall into three categories depending on what they eat because, you know, we know they're blood suckers, but not all of them are exclusively blood suckers. No. And if they're blood suckers, they are called two of the greatest words, take your pick, sanguivorous or hematophagis. Yeah. 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 a great steak. They just want the blood. But yeah, like you said, not all of them are blood suckers. There's some called worm leeches that eat entire invertebrates, very, very small invertebrates, but they don't really care about the blood or else they're not just interested in the blood. But most leeches as far as we think of leeches are sanguivorous. Yeah, but the other two categories are pretty horrifying in how they get their blood out. It's like one sounds really bad, and then the next one doesn't sound much better kind of thing. The jawed leech is the one that we're most commonly, you know, when you're watching stand by me and poor little Wil Wheaton gets a leech on his peepee. Which now that we've seen

that and now that, or I should say now that we've researched this, they got it so wrong. Those kids really did it wrong when they removed the leeches. Oh, for sure. And it's probably unlikely that that leech would have made its way to its peepee that quickly. Although you never know. Yeah, you never know. I heard they do like kind of a warm secluded area to do their work. You know, Wil Wheaton used to listen to the show. I doubt if he still does. Oh, I doubt it. Remember the early days? Shout out to 2010 Wil Wheaton. He's like, quit talking about my peepee. But that's the jawed leech, the one, you know, the one that's kind of the most common and most familiar with. And it's, we're going to talk about medicinal

leeches later. That's what they use there. But these things will feed on almost anything that they can latch onto that has blood. Mammals, frogs, birds, fish, it basically anything it can get a hold of that has blood it'll latch onto. They strongly prefer mammals though. The rest of this stuff is just kind of junk food basically for them. Sure. I can tell. Can we talk just for a second about how the jawed leeches, how they do their thing? Yeah, with those little razor sharp teeth. Let's do it. It's scary. Yes. So they have like, if you look at a picture of a jawed leech mouth, everybody says it looks like a Mercedes emblem and it does. There's really no better way to put it. Yeah. 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 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, 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 that just keeps sawing deeper and deeper into your skin, finally reaching a blood vessel when it strikes gold, red gold, which you and I would call blood, it just sucks out into the leech because it's created a vacuum pump. Yeah. And I love this. Where did you get this bit that you sent? Do you remember? I think parasite of the day. I don't remember. I wrote down everything else,

but this might be the parasite of the day site. Because it sounds like, like this one part, it sounds like it was written by a Midwestern exterminator when they're talking about anything, basically can attach to anything. It's like sandpaper, glass paper, velcro, 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. Hey, thanks. It says even vertically positioned surfaces coated with Vaseline are no major problem for a leech to climb. The deal with these teeth though is that they're so sharp that it's more scalpel like in that, I mean, a leech bite can hurt mainly in land leeches,

but it's not, when you hear like razor like teeth, you think it would be super painful, 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? By the way, I like that we're myth crumblers now instead of crushers. Oh yeah, that's right. I like crumbler better. Okay, cool. That is a myth. Awesome. Yes, another myth crumbled. Boom. There's a DV show in there, I think. I think so. It's very graphics heavy, like whenever we do the myth, it'll just crumble away like a cookie. Oh, 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 wipe? Star wipe.

The king of all wipes. Yeah, but this crumble wipe, we really might be onto something. Yeah, there is no, I mean, you can find textbooks that say that too, right? Yeah, 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 that are amazing, that do amazing things, and we'll talk more about those, but those are not. An anesthetic is not one of them. It's just that for the jawed leeches, their little semi-circular denticles that they use as circular saws are so sharp and they go so, such a, what's the word with the opposite of deep? Oh, so shallow into your skin

that you might not feel them being there. That's what it is. Opposite of deep. I have so many jokes, I just can't pick one. There's also the jawless leech was the other kind, which includes the giant Amazon leech, which can grow to what, like 18 to 20 inches? Yeah. Look up a picture of these things. It's horrifying. 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's 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, I wear size 11 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 leech, all you see are 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, I think. But this one, I said there were two different equally horrifying ways in which they can draw blood. This one doesn't have the circular saw teeth. It has a hypodermic needle, basically, a proboscis 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 denticle saws are a 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. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't

have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like

smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the

iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's your result? Which 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 I love or care about. Oh, thank you. Am I in that group? That includes you, buddy. Yes. Jerry? Of course, sure. Dave? Yes, Dave too. Who else you got? What about the other Dave? Sure. Dave Kustin. I'm sorry. Dave Kustin. Sure. You got Olivia, Julia Layton. The Grabster. The Grabster. Franklin Chair. Oh, yeah, sure. Of course. Remember when you used to have our regular guest producers just float in and out? Yep. There's Matt, Noel, care about them too. Don't

want leeches on them either. Who else guest 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 niece, Mila, I think I've told you before, she's gotten some parts in movies. Yeah, a little performer. The big one, her first big one where she's like one of the main characters is coming out February 25th on Hulu. No way. It's huge. It's a big 20th Century Fox production called No Exit. It will be out on Hulu on February 25th. I saw the trailer, she gave me chills. Really? She plays a kidnapped young girl who is just terrified and has to be

rescued by a slightly older girl, Havana Rose Lu. 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. And a cash cow, am I right? She's rolling in it. She can't even drive. She's got like a whole garage full of cars already. Wow, that is super cool. That is awesome. My daughter is funny and fun, but she can't act up, try to see if she could. She can't, so it takes a lot more than personality. You've got to really have talent. It's absolutely true. It's really tough for an adult to watch a child actor most of the time and she does superbly. That's what I was saying. We're all really, really proud of her. She does actual great work in this movie. Way to go, Mila.

Way to go, Mila. Send 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 send me the trailer. They are, I mean, we have fossils of leeches from 400 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 and the youngins kind of rely on that but I think when they get older, I guess their eyesight either fails or they 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're so good at sensing vibrations. They have little hairs on their

bodies that act as sensory organs so that 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, in the trailer for No Exit coming out February 25th, the hairs on my arm were standing on and I could have detected vibrations in water with those things. That is a Hodgman level plug. Thank you. That's good. I'll stop now. Leeches, no, no, no, we don't need to stop. Leeches are amazing swimmers. They can kind of inch along in the water very deftly and then when they hit your skin, they're gonna probably not go toward 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. Exactly. So one of the things we said that their saliva really does have some pretty neat compounds in it and 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 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 they're kind of a medical marvel, a 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, Heriodine. Do you think I'm pronouncing

that correctly? That sounds right. I'm glad you said it. Heriodine or Herodine. I'm thinking Heriodine. Yeah, and we'll talk about it more 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 injects some of its saliva containing Heriodine in it, like your blood just 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 going to still keep bleeding for up to 10 hours afterward because that Heriodine

is so powerful as far as anticoagulants go. I also saw 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 vessels so that more blood pumps out more freely. Yeah, I mean, this is a little evolutionary miracle of a mouse on a bug but slug. Yeah, slug bug. They will drink blood like crazy. They will drink as much as 10 times their body weight sometimes because they are a bit like the camel 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 in a little pouch where they have these enzymes because blood will eventually go bad, but they have enzymes that protect it and keep it fresh. Yeah, another thing that they're

studying with leeches these days is it's microbiota in its stomach and its gut, just like they're studying our microbiota, which I think is the most fascinating thing of all time. They're also studying leeches to figure out what's going on in there to keep the blood from spoiling because 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 meal. It takes long enough that a leech probably only feeds it a few times in its life, I believe. Yeah, because they don't live that long. I mean, I think no more than a few years, probably max. That would be my guess as well. We should talk about the Tyrant King leech, the Tyrannobdela rex,

and this is a one-jawed sucker that 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 and up in that mucous 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 because they found these kinds of leeches in eyeballs like attached to the mucous membrane around your eyeball, your urethra, so much so that it will block your ability to pee,

your anus, or your vagina. I'd rather have one there than the other two places. Or your vagina. They found leeches in vaginas, these kind of leeches, and the other worst part about them, Chuck, is that a leech that's feeding on you externally, like a typical jawed leech, it'll feed for maybe 20 to 30 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 feel what's called foreign body movement. There's something moving around inside of them and their body's like, 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, there's something like buzzing. I was like, that's not a good sign. No. Oh man, that was so funny. I mean, it was funny for me. Right. And she handled it pretty well, I gotta say. Can we read that thing from 1835, since we're just at the, maybe the grossest part of this whole episode? Yeah, go ahead, hit it. Do you know the one I'm talking about? I think so. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I see it. So there was a case study that was mentioned on a site, a historian site called GerryWalton.com, G-E-R-I Walton.com, who is a historian and she wrote about a girl who was gathering watercress in 1835. 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 thigh was about twice its natural size, tense red and shining and very painful. And finally the doctor like cut out this blood clot of blood and pus, he says, which he drained and emptied into a bowl on emptying the matter from the bowl on a clean 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 Limnatus nilloticta is one of the ones that doesn't have the power to break the skin with its little teeth or jaws. So 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're not known to generally do what happened in this girl, right? No, which is why 185 years later, 87 years later, we're talking about it on stuff you should know, because it is so messed up. I almost feigned when I first read it and it takes a lot to make me feel like I could feign if I, if I don't stop imagining it, like putting myself here in this situation. Yeah, I mean, that's horrifying. I guess it hasn't happened a ton since then because that was 1835. Right, right. No, it is extremely rare. And even like you said, that one that will, that will, like when you, you'll drink it up and it attaches, that's actually killed some people. It famously killed some of the Napoleon soldiers

in Egypt in 1799. 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 soldier's airways and some of them died from suffocation. Yeah. I mean, what's probably not going to happen almost certainly is you're not going to 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, you know, unless you're in Napoleon's army. Right, right. And you 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. They are internal sex organs and they do make, you know, they have, 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 or some insect that did something similar. Probably ticks. Maybe where they attach to each other and kind of just line up where their parts should be and the male sort of fit. The male produces a container like a syringe like container of sperm called a spermatophore 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 little part of their body called the clatellum, it produces a thick fluid that the fertilized eggs are enshrouded in in that cocoon and then they attach the cocoons to like plants or put them in the mud or something like that. And a few weeks or months later, baby leeches hatch and they just, they hatch like fully formed and just grow over time as they feed. But they, they do this reciprocally. Yeah, that was right. Where each leech fertilizes one another's eggs. So as the leeches mate, they are fertilizing one another's eggs. They're both receiving and sending sperm and it's pretty neat. It's, it's kind of a real tit for tat arrangement thing. 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 what I always say. Sure. No, no good. No, it's good. I liked it. What about the kangaroo leech? I think that one bears mentioning as well too, as far as reproductions. Yeah, the kangaroo, 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 pretty interesting, especially the kangaroo leech, 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 fend for themselves,

which is sort of adorable. And so, and this definitely was from thedailyparasite.com, but they said that the leech basically shoots them, the pouch of baby leeches explosively onto a passing frog when it's ready, when it says like, fly away little birds, it's time for you 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 it happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, I wonder if I know that they can't kill a human, can leeches kill a fish or a frog? I think they can kill livestock if you don't get them off. Yeah, 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 easier. I read

that poor elephants will be driven like almost crazy when a leech gets up inside of its 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, I think they can kill animals because they can't get them off as easy. Poor elephants. I know, I feel really good. Just sucking that water up, having fun. Very sad. So I say we talk, we give everybody the good people some advice about how to get rid of a leech if you find one on you. And then let's take a break. How 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

human bloodborne diseases. It's a big one. Yeah, anytime there's like a bloodsucker, you kind of might want to worry about that, but not in this case. But what you want to do is don't panic and just tear it off of you because it might detach and 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. And another one that you want to do is you don't want to treat it too rough. Like, you might want to beat it up and, and, 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, 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 and just be like, oh, fiddle didi, there's a leech on me, I better carefully remove it. Let me dial up the stuff you should know episode and listen all the way through the 32 minutes till 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. 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 pulls its jaws out too as well. And again, that wound's going to bleed for maybe 10 hours I saw in a popular science article. So just you got to clean the wound, you got to dress it and you're going to have to redress it probably more than once because it's going to 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 remember it happening. You? I don't think I've ever had a leech on me. No, I've had plenty of ticks, but never a leech. Well, keep that streak going. I'm trying. That's what I say. I'm trying. I steered 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. 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, well, that kid wants dysentery or something like that.

And I mean, we're like 10. I don't know how this kid even knew about dysentery, 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 and that made a huge impression on me. Yeah. I grew up with the creek behind my house, so I just, I don't know. I'll always try and get in water if I can. Oh, the other thing that scared me too in that same creek was somebody saying, like, what about water moccasins? Like 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. Yeah, I get it. I get it. I don't really regret it. All right. Well, let's have a

little pause for the cause and we will, jeez, it just turned into Johnny Fever, RIP by the way, Howard Hessmann. What? Yeah, he just passed away. What a BS year already for celebrity deaths. I know. Man, I'll tell you who turned out to be a great person in retrospect was Bob Saget. Mike, did you ever read any of like the tributes to him? Yeah, pretty heartwarming. You should read, have you read John Stamos's eulogy? Yeah. Amazing, dude. I think very highly of Bob Saget now, but also John Stamos too. Yeah, and weirdly, John Mayer. I don't know if you're writing that stuff. I didn't know they were good buddies. He wrote some very good things. You mean like John Mayer a lot. She didn't like his music, but she thinks he's pretty cool. Oh yeah. And yeah,

so that's how we kind of got sucked into the whole Bob Saget death thing. Okay. All right. And Jeffrey Ross too. He was a really good friend of Bob Saget. My brother worked with Saget and he, I remember years ago saying that he was like the nicest dude. Yeah, he seems to have been the real deal for sure. RIP, everybody who we've lost this year. How about that? Yeah. And now let's take a break and we're going to talk about bloodletting right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my

favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or

wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikar and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So we're finally at part two, 35 minutes in, where we're talking about the history of bloodletting and using medicinal leeches. And just a brief overview of bloodletting, it's based on the humoral theory of health and disease, which says that we have four humors, right? We've got blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. And over time, people said, I think blood's like the real 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 used like knives or whatever and cut into your veins to bleed you out, to remove some of that blood. And somewhere along the way, people said, I think leeches are a better treatment for this, because it's a lot gentler and kindler than cutting into somebody's arm. Sure. And you probably don't lose nearly the amount of blood. But we covered this years ago. It had to have been in one of our weird medical top 10s. But I know we talked about medical leeches at some point. But here we go again, because they used them a lot back then. I think the early 19th 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 age, at least so far, of leaching or leach mania of losing blood via leach. And there was a man specifically, a doctor in Paris, Dr. François, would that be Bruce? Mm hmm. Nice. Okay. Trey Bien. And he was a physician in Paris who he basically was like, you know what, everything that's wrong with anyone is inflammation of your intestines. It all goes back to that. So anybody that comes by my clinic, my military hospital, the first thing that we're going to do, I don't care what you say is wrong with you, is we're going to throw 50 leeches on your body right out of the gate to see what happens.

Yeah, he earned the nickname Le Vampire de la Medicine, which seems appropriate. But he was hugely popular, so much so that, and leeches were hugely popular too. But the ideas of Bruce were so popular that he even reached into the fashion world where people would wear like dresses with leeches embroidered all over them. Like leach 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 theories about bloodletting and leeches were hugely influential until a cholera epidemic in 1832, and his methods proved disastrous, and he fell out of favor. Oh, interesting.

I couldn't see what happened, but you can probably guess that a lot of people died because he mistreated them by massive bloodletting or whatever. But it seems to have ended that leach mania thing. And then like we said before, the leeches just kind of fell to the wayside because modern medicine was like, no, 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, it takes a lot of leeches. It's not like a doctor would have like six or eight of these laying around. 35 million medical leeches were being imported every year into France alone in the 1830s. And if you're asking yourself, how do you get this many leeches?

You get them the old fashioned way. There were people like leech. I mean, Dave calls them 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 and sell them. And yeah, on Jerry Walton's website, I saw she wrote that they would in this manner gather about 500 leeches a day. That's crazy. They were doing a good job. It is crazy. It's very because she wrote a whole post on leech gathering as a weird profession that finally kind of fell to the wayside. And it did indeed fell to the wayside until I think the 70s when some daring, adventurous physiologists started studying what's called herudotherapy. And it became kind of

important first in reconstructive surgery. And it just makes utter and complete sense that you would use it for this. So I guess they were starting to study it in the 70s, but it wasn't until 1985 when a plastic surgeon named Joseph Upton like really put it to the test. I get the impression it was mostly clinical or lab studies and maybe just kind of postulation and Upton said, I'm trying it. I'm at the end of my rope. I'm going to give this shot. Yeah, it is pretty amazing. There was a boy, a five-year-old boy in Boston who went in and said, my right ear was bitten off in the park. It was a wicked dog and very sad. I'm just kind of kidding around. But that all ends well. Don't worry. That's the reason I'm telling that joke. He reattached 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 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 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 and 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 it a shot. And he ordered 30 leeches. Had them

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 were sucking that blood up enough to where it regained its color. And he made a complete recovery. Yeah. And it did that by that vasodilation. So it improved blood flow. It kept that blood from coagulating so it wasn't clotting. So it was flowing even more smoothly. And the leeches themselves were steadily pumping the blood out. So there wasn't any blood to pool and turn rancid and become stagnant. So the veins can do amazing thing. Your blood vessels do spectacular things. Whenever they face an obstacle, they will figure out a way to go around it and grow around it and make new connections. So by using leeches, you are giving those veins

enough breathing room to kind of figure it out themselves and reconnect and re-institute that kind of blood flow out of that area. 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 1980s. And science has really been taking them seriously ever since. It's amazing. It's almost like they are meant to do this. This is their one little function that can benefit humankind. So much so that in 2004, the FDA said medical leeches approved. It's actually approved. And this is where I definitely remember us talking about it. It's approved as a medical device.

I know what you're thinking of. We did an entire episode on maggots. Oh, okay. And they're also approved as a medical device for similar stuff, 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. Yeah, totally. So they are legit medical devices. I think the actual quote from the FDA was, for the purpose of overcoming the problem of venous congestion by creating prolonged localized bleeding. Sounds like something Galen would have written. And this is the sort of sad part, is their single use. So they use these leeches and then they euthanize them in alcohol instead of,

I don't know, take them outside, 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 folksome for leeches. Sure. At least let them stay alive for the next like 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 he said

had saved his life and he kept them in a jar like a good guy, but he was a little wacky. He actually named them and would supposedly ask their opinion on cases that he was handling as a lawyer and looking at like how they swim as some sort of divining indicator of how he should, which direction his case should go. Crazy. Kind of like that octopus in the World Cup. I don't remember. Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, exactly like that. And there's, that was Thomas Erskine and he's part of this really interesting article from JSTOR Daily by Amelia Soth that I think Rue's found. That's really good if you're into that, if you want to read about that whole leach mania. Because it was way more than just the medical

profession. It was like the whole society just kind of revered leeches 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 leeches for a while. Yeah, but while the medical community is legitimately using them, the wellness community is probably overusing them. There are clinics in Arizona, there's some in England and other parts of the world where their leach therapy is really far reaching and basically saying it can help with everything from arthritis to cancer to carpal terpies to hemorrhoids. Not sure exactly where that treatment, how that goes, but I have a pretty good idea. Yeah, but there are other uses therapeutically that doctors are looking into,

but they are roundly 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 eight 17th century Europe or wherever that was. Right, right. But yeah, they do think that they're anti-inflammatory properties, anti-tumor properties like in those leeches saliva, it's pretty neat. You never know. Keep an ear out for a leach update in 10 years from us. Okay, maybe a leach will be in the Senate by then. There's already a few in there, I would say. You got anything else, Chuck? I got nothing else. Chuck's got nothing else, everybody, which means it's time for a listener mail. Hey guys, I know you don't always worry about

pronunciation, but it's different on an oft-repeated phrase and I just can't help myself. So we're going to allow this, Robin. We usually don't take pronunciation emails very seriously because we famously mispronounce things almost on purpose, right? Almost. The Arctic Fox episode is the latest in Josh said the phrase coup de gras, where he correctly left the pea silent, but incorrectly said fat, gras in French is fat with a silent last letter like foie gras instead of gras, silent e but a soft c. It loosely sounds like grass. Doubtless you were doing your best, but foie gras is a decidedly different thing from a coup de gras. Okay. I teach French to little people what I generally say is that the last letter is silent, 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 petit and petite with an e on the end or not. You don't have to read my message on the show, but please take the message to heart and now back to the adorable Arctic Fox and that is Robin, who is she, her and Victoria BC. Great town that Victoria BC, Robin. Thank you very much for that little French lesson. It's been many, many years since I had one. I will try to remember from now on. Everyone says coup de gras though. Everyone says it. Yeah, but everybody's got it wrong. You say, I mean, that's American saying. You say coup de gras at the next dinner party and prepare to be laughed out of their yokel. I'm going to, I'm going to try a different one. I'm

going to say coup de grace. Okay, that's good. Okay. See you and just make it right. If you want to get in touch with us like Robin did with the little French lesson, a 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 stuffpodcasts.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here

to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.