I had 20 leeches in the bottoms of both feet when I was a kid. They were borrowed in there...there was no removing them manually. Fortunately my quick-thinking parent had spray mosquito repellant - sprayed the bottom of my feet and the leeches all let go and crawled out in about 15 seconds. So use spray mosquito repellant is my personal recommendation.
IIRC, all chemical removal methods (including DEET/mosquito repellant) have the same potential downsides as salting; they increase the risk of the leech vomiting back into the wound and causing an infection.
Wow, if only you had been there to see it. Yes, they BURROWED. Yes, it was horrifying. They were fat and full of blood as they dripped off my feet. I have a quite accurate visual memory of certain past events. I still remember my mother's face, she was terrified, but also quick thinking, and I didn't feel a thing. I have a healthy respect for leeches, but strangely, the incident left me feeling quite invincible. My feet were fine the next day.
The one time I had leeches they just popped off on their own. They were huge so they were probably full. My white T shirt had turned into a red one... Because of the anticoagulant.
Not a fan of them but where I live now they don't exist
It's the same with Ticks! People will say to burn them off but if you do that they will throw up and increase the likelihood of disease transmission. You want to pull them off in one clean pull.
Edit: Here is the research on which the medical advice is based. Dated 2019 by Australian researchers, so the updated practise might not be widely deployed outside Australia.
Really hard to get the suckers (literally) off using regular tweezers without squeezing them into regurgitation and death. They sell special tick removal tools that look like a tiny two-prong fork which grabs them from the … face I guess… and allows removing them cleanly.
If you live in an area with ticks, getting tick tweezers is a must. The ones we have have the fork you mention on one end, but what is much better is it has tweezers on the other end that have a hockey stick like curve at the bottom and come to a very small point. Very easy to grab a small tick and pull it off.
You're also supposed to save the tick to make diagnosis of tick-borne illness easier. Years ago I had what felt like a four-day hangover after getting bit so I went to the doctor; he gave me Doxy and sent my blood off to the lab which later confirmed that I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Supposedly it's easier/more conclusive to test the tick itself for pathogens than your blood.
Pantyhose is another thing to consider. It's pretty much the perfect anti-tick measure. It's not too hot and the ticks can't make their way through it. I know a few farmers who use it when going out into the bushes, they never get ticks.
I’ve used those and they are a bit fiddly. The best tool I’ve found are the needle pointed angled precision tweezers (like they mostly sell for electronics work).
If you would rather follow your gut because the expert's recommendation sounds "too easy, then picture a similar scenario in your own area of expertise where you give friendly advise to a random person and they react like that to your advice.
If the article has a video or something showing how to "using a fingernail or a credit card to break the seal" I'd be so much more convinced.
I can't even imagine how to do that correctly when I'm sitting in an air-conditioned room so the chance I'll able to "break the seal" in the wild as the expert suggests is around zero. Especially the article says one has to do it "quickly" so it doesn't have time to vomit blood back into me.
Unless I misread, GP thinks the advice is too hard, not "too easy". Which yes, if I told someone playing games on linux is easy you just need to use `winetricks` to install the correct version of X, Y, Z, then modify library overrides, I would entirely expect a layperson to say "easier said than done".
As someone who’s had leeches on me, North Eastern America, and never even heard of salting them I’ve always just treated them like a bandaid and ripped them off quickly. The hardest part really is grabbing them since they are slippery. I assume there’s nastier leeches out there though where that might be a bad idea.
I would always put the area with the leech back into the water and then use a sharp edged rock to scrape them off. They seemed a little bit more willing to leave my skin doing it that way.
Leeches will pop off easily. There's a nastier cousin of leeches (lampreys) that I think you'll rip a small chunk of flesh out if you'd yank them off forcefully.
In my experience, the reason people don't scrape them off is the rumour that they leave their mouthparts behind.
Removing the terrestrial leeches that live near me in Australia is easy. Put the edge of a credit card a few cm away, resting against your skin at a slight angle, and then quickly scrape the leech away like you're scraping paint.
> Far easier said than done. If it were that easy why even go for the salt?
I think it's more gross to pluck it out. Hence why people just pour salt on it or let it finish feeding maybe? Leeches can be really viscerally repulsive to look at and touch
The difference with spiders laying eggs in your ear, is that leeches sucking on your body is a regognized medical treatment for various things.
They don't lay eggs, they don't infest you. They just suck blood and are gone.
But just nitpicking on your example. I had leeches involuntarily on me for real where I just ripped them off and I don't think I would ever considering letting them suck till they are full.
A colonoscopy is a legitimate, useful medical procedure, but I don’t want one of those to sneak up on me either.
I think I could tolerate a medical leech if required. I wouldn’t love it, but you gotta do what you’ve gotta do. I would be less tolerant of one randomly taking a meal from my leg.
I dunno, I think I'd rather dribble in some hydrogen peroxide to sterilize and remove the eggs, as opposed to getting a spider bite on the inside of my ear canal.
Now that I think about it, I have no idea what hydrogen peroxide does to spiderweb material. It seems like the kind of thing one might learn during a childhood phase of mostly-unthinking cruelty to animals.
Same here, I thought it was going to be an analogy for a political story.
Now that I know it is literal leeches and that the options are scraping them off or waiting for them to finish, avoiding areas with leeches feels like the move.
The Tick Key, www.tickkey.com, does the job quite well. You put it over the tick and slide the narrow slot from behind until the mouthparts are in as far as they can fit.
You may be surprised at how hard the tick holds on, but work slowly until it pops off, preferably into a container that you can put in the freezer.
Etick.ca can be used to identify and report the tick.
My cat has brought in three ticks this spring and summer that I found crawling about while he was on my lap. Cats grooming themselves seem to prevent ticks from embedding.
Doctors can prescribe doxycycline as a precaution.
At least in Australia, removing a tick by force is not recommended. This is because it has a chance of the tick vomiting pathogens into your blood. Which is particularly bad in regions where ticks carry bad diseases (like the paralysis tick in Australia). The recommendation is instead to use a freeze spray which immediately immobilises the tick.
I was once hiking in the dark in the south of Japan. I crossed a few streams but didn't think much of it. A while later, I felt like my socks were sticking to my shoes and unusually warm. I looked down to see my ankles and shoes covered in blood. Totally drenched in dark red blood with 10 leeches attached. This was truly the most confused and terrified I ever felt in my life - seeing that much blood without feeling any pain was utterly disorienting.
