Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

As a follow-up to my last post about art implants and body modification, I submit to you the bagel forehead – a craze sweeping the trendier clubs in Japan.

There is one encouraging thing about this practice.  If you don’t like it, at least it’s not permanent.  It is, however, probably painful.  The bulges like the ones you see above are created by the insertion of a needle under the skin through which saline drips to create the bump.  Once the selected part is inflated, the person who has been inflated can poke and prod the bulbous part.  A popular look is to press a dent into the center, creating the bagel look.

People choose all different types of body parts to inflate, but the forehead is popular because it is so obvious.  One drawback is that frequent inflation of one’s forehead can lead to a saggy forehead.  The skin can get stretched permanently.

But hey, there’s always Botox, right?

Taken from the name of the creature itself – Hirudo medicinalis, or the European medicinal leech – Hirudotherapy is the name used for the medical use of leeches.  This practice was very common in early medicine, but is still used today.

In older times, if a sickness caused the patient to flush, the doctors assumed that the patient had too much blood in the body.  The leeches were used to drain out the excess blood, thus (theoretically) restoring balance to the humors of the human body.  Aelus Galenus, a Roman philosopher and physician, believed in Hippocrates’ humors theory, which stated that the humors were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.  Imbalances in the humors caused different personality “disorders” – those with too much yellow bile were melancholy, those with too much blood were sanguine, with overly social behavior.

Following the establishment of Galen’s theories, Nicander, a Greek physician, started using leeches for medicinal treatment in 200 B.C.  Prior to the use of leeches, physicians would use a procedure called “cupping” to achieve bloodletting.  This procedure would start with an incision to the patient’s skin, and then a cup would be placed over the incision to cause a vacuum effect to suck out the blood.  Nicander discovered that leeches were far more effective and less difficult to administer than cups, and the practice took off.

In the 12th century, someone named Abd-el-latif al-Baghdadi started using leeches to clean up after surgery.  He would apply the leech to suck away the excess blood.  That’s more in line with the way hirudotherapy is used today.  It is used in microsurgery as a way to keep the blood from coagulating.  They are also used in reconstructive surgery as a means to restore blood flow to reattached body parts.  Too bad they’re so creepy-looking, because they really are a sort of medical marvel.