Maggots and infections: you may want to skip this post if this gives you the heeby jeebies!
November 20, 2008 by Marijke Durning, RN
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
Maggot therapy is coming back to popular medicine. Seriously. Just as leeches are. In fact, someone I know experienced leech therapy first-hand when her husband cut off three of his fingers in a table saw accident. Those little critters (who my friend said they named!) kept the circulation going in the re-attached fingers and saved them.
But maggot therapy is something different. People with chronic illnesses that keep them bedridden or unable to move out of a wheelchair can end up with bed sores that go very deep. They are incredibly painful and are easily infected. Others may develop diabetic foot ulcers, that’s a sore that has developed and, like a bedsore, has gone deep into the tissue. It’s for these that maggot therapy is being used.
Maggots eat the infected, dead or dying tissue, leaving only healthy tissue behind. This means that infection shouldn’t set in, reducing the need for antibiotics. In fact, it was the discovery of antibiotics that retired the maggots because of the ease of use and the effectiveness of the medications. But, with the advent of new superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics, our old friends, the maggots, have been brought out of retirement.
How do we know that maggot therapy is being used more often now? Insurance companies have been considering covering its cost, which is substantially less than the more expensive antibiotics that are often needed for deep infections and for amputations, which often occur if the infections can’t be cleared up.
The FDA approved the use of specially prepared maggots for the treatment of these ulcers, or sores, which costs about 100 dollars. Compare that to the thousands of medications and amputation.
So, everything old is new again, including using nature’s bounty.
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Tags: chronic pain blog, pain blog, maggot therapy, maggots, superbugs
Gooooo maggots! XD
What a natural way to deal with such tough issues.
I’m going to link to your post, Marijke. This is just the kind of old-fashioned forward thinking that’s needed in the medical world right now, to me.
Okay this gave me the willies but my dad is in the hospital right now with a severe infection in his knee. He had knee-replacement surgery just before Thanksgiving and developed some sores from the bandages. His knee had all this black skin on it and infection so he just went in and they cleaned it out and have a machine on it that sucks infection out of the knee. This almost sounds like something he could use right about now.