Maggots Eating Your Wounds – Great for Recovery
October 17th 2006 08:47
Maggots Eating Your Wounds – Great for Recovery
As absolutely obscure and grotesque as this sounds, maggots actually speed up the healing of wounds. From early days, doctors noticed that soldiers that had maggots on their wounds healed quicker. This is due to the repulsive insects having a liking for eating up dead skin cells and bacteria. Believe it or not, maggots (which are just flies that are still at the larval stage of development) were commonly used for the recovery of wounds before antibiotics were discovered! This is now called Maggot Therapy. Ewww!
Do you want to see a picture of this grotesque display? Be warned though, it's not for the faint-hearted.
Maggot therapy involves a doctor administering live, disinfected maggots into the soft tissue wound of a patient for the purpose of selectively cleaning out the dead tissue within the wound, disinfecting it by killing bacteria and stimulating wound healing. Clinical studies of the therapy began in 1989 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre at the University of California. Results demonstrated that maggot therapy was more effective and efficient at cleaning many types of infected and gangrenous wounds than commonly prescribed treatments.
And maggots have yet another use! When forensic scientists find these little buggers on decomposing corpses, they indicate the time elapsed since death and where the person died by looking at their stage of development.
But wait, there’s more! The New Scientist reported this week that it is now known that maggots also secrete a fluid containing enzymes which help speed up the healing process even more. The University of Bradford in the UK hopes to produce wound dressings coated with purified maggot extracts so live maggots wouldn’t be needed, becoming a way less repulsive treatment. “You could get the benefits without the insects themselves” Stephen Britland at the University says.
As absolutely obscure and grotesque as this sounds, maggots actually speed up the healing of wounds. From early days, doctors noticed that soldiers that had maggots on their wounds healed quicker. This is due to the repulsive insects having a liking for eating up dead skin cells and bacteria. Believe it or not, maggots (which are just flies that are still at the larval stage of development) were commonly used for the recovery of wounds before antibiotics were discovered! This is now called Maggot Therapy. Ewww!
Do you want to see a picture of this grotesque display? Be warned though, it's not for the faint-hearted.
Maggot therapy involves a doctor administering live, disinfected maggots into the soft tissue wound of a patient for the purpose of selectively cleaning out the dead tissue within the wound, disinfecting it by killing bacteria and stimulating wound healing. Clinical studies of the therapy began in 1989 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Centre at the University of California. Results demonstrated that maggot therapy was more effective and efficient at cleaning many types of infected and gangrenous wounds than commonly prescribed treatments.
And maggots have yet another use! When forensic scientists find these little buggers on decomposing corpses, they indicate the time elapsed since death and where the person died by looking at their stage of development.
But wait, there’s more! The New Scientist reported this week that it is now known that maggots also secrete a fluid containing enzymes which help speed up the healing process even more. The University of Bradford in the UK hopes to produce wound dressings coated with purified maggot extracts so live maggots wouldn’t be needed, becoming a way less repulsive treatment. “You could get the benefits without the insects themselves” Stephen Britland at the University says.
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