Hollywood Trends of Days Gone By…..

• Oxygen Bars - Strange, but I let I ignored it and it’s a dead fad now.
• Botox Parties - Can rich women be anymore vain? It will pass.
• Detox Diets - Adding a health stamp to the act of self-starvation for work. Only for the strong willed.
• Heiresses - As if the silver spoon that they were born with wasn’t enough, now they want the fame and glory that most starving actors spend years fighting to achieve, though most don’t.
• Buddhism - I can’t begin to count the number of actors who have jumped on this bandwagon, but what every helps fund the Free Tibet cause, I suppose….

Hollywood trends, no matter how bizarre or insane, usually achieve some level of household name status with most disappearing into a distant afterthought. But the the latest and greatest from actress, Demi Moore is just down right disturbing, disgusting and dumb.

Apparently, she announced Monday on national late night TV, NBC’s The Late Show with David Letterman, that in her quest to find “cutting edge of things that are for optimizing your health and healing” she has discovered leech therapy in Austria.

Last time I checked, that’s not new, that’s just backwards medicine from the 16th and 17th century. That’s how they treated George Washington when he was on his death bed, along with everyone else at the time because they believed that bloodletting via leeches was a method of cleansing the blood and stimulating health.

Personally, I believe that allowing a parasite to suck your blood has no medical value, but not to be entirely dismissive I found an interesting article from The New York Times about the revival of age-old cures via maggots and leeches. (However, it was published in 2005,…..perhaps this means that Demi’s a little late to jump on this bandwagon).

To top it off, the “therapist” who convinced her to try the treatment has also led Demi to believe that treatment uses “highly trained medical leeches” …… supposedly a far cry from your standard swamp leeches. Good grief! A leech is a leech, a backbone-lacking parasite that sucks your blood. It ain’t no freakin dog or monkey. (Sorry folks - no links in this paragraph. I dare not Google leeches for fear of having to look at one, please look them up yourselves if you are interested. I am sure that there is plenty of information on Wikipedia.com).

Public Relations Notes: Either that leech therapist has a very good public relations agency or she is just insanely PR savvy to secure Demi Moore’s endorsement for this wacky health treatment on national television. If more people jump on this bandwagon, I just may be sick (but very amazed). At the same time, if public reaction is pretty negative (as it should be), then I just may have more faith in people’s ability to think for themselves rather than following Hollywood’s lead on everything.

What’s next? Perhaps a facial in which you let a live jellyfish suck on your face.

nataliedee.com