Plucinski, an immigrant from Poland, places leeches on clients’ bodies to cure ailments, from sciatica to migraines, and for general good health. The designated leeching zone is an intimate space sectioned off to the side by hanging white sheets. Empty metal folding chairs and a cushioned table line the curtained off area where clients typically wait in white robes taking their leeches. Plucinski purchases all his leeches online from leech farms, which are delivered by courier.
This seems, to say the least, retro. Blood-sucking leeches are right up there with medieval bloodletting and plague for New Yorkers, the stuff of dusty old folios found in ancient libraries. But for some middle-aged immigrants from eastern Europe or Russia, hirudotherapy is considered an old folk remedy, popular with their grandparents’ generation. Some of them saw jars of leeches at pharmacies as children and remember sick relatives who were treated with leeches behind closed doors.
The tension between old and new is a big part of Plucinski’s existence. His clinic is in an area that remains, as it has been for decades, predominantly Polish. There are a few hipsters scattered through the neighborhood – runoff from the $4,000-a-month gentrified lofts of Williamsburg. He’s used to skepticism.
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Leeching might sound primitive but the FDA approved leeches as “medical devices” in 2004 to drain pooled blood after surgery. The most common use is after a digit replant (when a severed digit is surgically reattached) and reconstructive flap surgery, similar to a skin graft. Leeches suck out the pooling blood, known as venous congestion. If oxygenated blood can’t reach the digit or skin flap tissue because of pooled blood, it dies, which results in amputation or removal.
“This is going to sound hokey,” says Dr Matthew Carty, a plastic surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Faulkner Hospital in Boston who occasionally uses leeches, “but it’s really a reflection of the majesty of nature. With all of our science and technology, there is this organism in nature that can do just as good a job in terms of serving this function as the most advanced surgical techniques we have.”
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According to Plucinski 98% of all heath problems can be cured through leeches, diet and annual colonics. He claims to have helped one client with paralysis walk without his two canes after eight sessions; another client, he says, was spared a triple bypass surgery; ovarian cysts were said to have disappeared from another. More modest improvements include better sleep, metabolism, and energy and “less gasses”.
“Leeches work on many different levels,” explains Plucinski. “You feel pain there, you put a leech there,” he states plainly – on the knee for a torn meniscus, on the gums for a gum infection, and it’s obvious where they’d go for hemorrhoids.
Blood-suckers in Brooklyn: how the old world medicine of leeches survives | Money | theguardian.com
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