A 23-year-old man from Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province, had to endure excruciating pain after falling for a traditional remedy he found online and inserting a 5-cm-long live leech into his bladder. It’s unclear how the young, misguided man came across this bizarre folk remedy, but what we do know is that he was so convinced of its “miraculous effects” that he went out of his way to find and buy a live leech.
After finally getting his hands on a little bloodsucker, the man, known only as Zheng, followed online instructions and proceeded to insert the invertebrate into his bladder through the urethra. This resulted in a urethral obstruction that caused him pain and made it impossible to urinate. But the leech didn’t remain in the urethra. It cawled its way into the bladder, where it attached to the walls of the sensitive organs and began releasing anticoagulants.
The leech caused Zheng such excruciating pain that he had no choice but to report to the emergency room of a local hospital, where doctors were shocked to hear his explanation. An ultrasound confirmed that he did, in fact, have a leech in his bladder, and doctors prepared for an emergency surgery to remove the parasite and save the man’s life.
A team led by the deputy director of the hospital’s urology department performed a transurethral bladder foreign body removal surgery, successfully removing the leech. Zheng was immediately able to urinate normally again, and his pain also subsided.
The unusual incident has been used by doctors as a cautionary tale meant to motivate the public to seek science-backed medical treatments rather than baseless remedies that often do more harm than good.
“The surgery itself carries risks and may cause secondary damage to the urethra and bladder. It may leave behind long-term suffering such as chronic pain, urinary dysfunction, recurrent infections, and urethral stricture,” Dr. Shan Zhongjie, director of the Department of Urology at Zhengzhou People’s Hospital, said about the potential problems Zheng could face in the future, as a result of his ignorance.
