Health
Hospitals in Indian-administered Kashmir have started using leeches to suck blood out of patients as part of their treatment.
Doctors in three hospitals are using leeches to treat heart problems and conditions such as arthritis, gout, chronic headaches and sinusitis.
Patients who have not been cured using conventional medicine are the most likely to want to try using leeches.
Leeches were widely used in medicine until the end of the 19th century.
The Kashmir hospitals using leeches follow the traditional unani system of medicine that originated in ancient Greece and is recognised by the Indian health authorities.
Dr Nasir Ahmed Hakeem heads the three hospitals. He says he has used leeches on at least 200 patients in the past year.
According to Dr Hakeem, there are more than 100 bio-active substances in the saliva of a leech which go into the body of a patient while it sucks the patient's blood.
Unani colleges do not train people in leech treatment, so Dr Hakeem has taken on traditional workers to apply the leeches to his patients.
Once a leech is used on a human it is then killed as part of the measures to prevent it passing on an infection from one patient to another.
Dr Hakeem has drawn a lot of criticism from the allopathic, or medical mainstream, community.
He cites the example of allopathic doctors using maggots to treat 'diabetic foot' (feet problems that develop in diabetic patients).
The maggot, he says, eats the rotten tissue in the foot but not the healthy tissue.
Dr Abdul Waheed Banday, former head of the department of medicine in Srinagar's Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, says that there is renewed interest in leech therapy in the West.