When Maggots Are What the Doctor Ordered
Reading Time: 4 minutesWhat It’s Like to Have Maggots Eating Your Flesh—on Purpose, Fly larvae can help heal gnarly wounds by eating the dead flesh., Maggot wound therapy: Why it’s useful, and what it feels like
This piece is from How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi, a collection edited by Dr. Chris Balakrishnan and Matt Wasowski. Copyright (c) 2024 by the authors and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
Take two maggots and call me in the morning.
Diana Dupuy was an otherwise healthy woman who had bunion surgery. When her cast came off, she found that she had a wound that wasn’t healing very well. Wounds need good blood flow to heal because blood brings oxygen, nutrients, and immune cells to the area. But in her case, the blood flow just wasn’t that great all the way down at her foot. And so the tissue, instead of scabbing and healing, was starting to die. ‘I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’ ‘ recalls Dupuy. ‘I knew that wasn’t good.’
To treat this, a doctor needs to use a scalpel to debride, or cut away, dead tissue. Antibiotics need to be given, and the wound needs to be carefully bandaged. Her podiatrist did all of that, but the wound just kept getting worse. Dupuy recalls, ‘Weeks had gone by and the wound looked worse and worse. It looked nasty.’ It was starting to become black—the telltale sign of dying, necrotic tissue. The problem with dead, bloodless tissue is that bacteria can run amok, infecting the wound and using it as a launching pad to infect the rest of you. So, to her shock, her podiatrist told her that if things didn’t turn around, they might have to amputate the foot to save her life. ‘I’m terrified at this point. I knew it was urgent, it was critical,’ states Dupuy. As you can imagine, she quickly became open to alternative ideas, no matter how seemingly insane.
And that’s when she stumbled across Ron Sherman, the maggot doctor. Sherman is a real physician, but also believes in the healing power of worms. Maggots are the larval form of the Diptera species—in other words, baby flies. It’s not all that uncommon for maggots to infest and grow in poorly healing human tissue—it’s called myiasis. Junior doctors across the world have spent countless nauseating hours removing such maggots from rotting flesh wounds.
But when Sherman was a medical intern in the 1980s, he used what little free time he had wandering the wards and collecting unwanted maggots from patients’ wounds and studying them under the microscope. He started to read old texts and realized that people had actually studied maggots before. A surgeon in Napoleon’s army noted that soldiers with maggots in their wounds seemed to fare better than those without. Similar doctor notes surfaced during the Civil War.
So Sherman decided to conduct a study. He found 103 people with poorly healing wounds (despite maximum medical therapy) and somehow managed to convince half of them to let him put maggots into their wounds. What he found surprised everybody. In the patients who combined maggots with standard medical therapies, 80 percent achieved complete debridement, compared with only 48 percent in those who politely declined the worms. ‘The results were so impressive that I continued working in that area,’ says Sherman.
In 2004, after more successful studies, Sherman applied to the Food and Drug Administration to get maggots approved for wound therapy. In 2007, maggots became the first living creatures to gain that approval. The FDA classified them as a ‘medical device,’ for lack of a better category. Sherman then opened a business with his wife where the couple grows, cultivates, and ships sterile maggots to doctors like Dupuy’s.
‘I didn’t know if it was going to make me vomit or pass out,’ remembers Dupuy. The maggots arrived at her doctor’s office impregnated in a gauze pad. The doctor simply applied the pad to the wound and covered it with a breathable dressing. ‘The maggots were hungry and they immediately started doing their work. I panicked. I was like, ‘Oh my God, look at all these maggots!’ ‘ says Dupuy. ‘But it seemed like when I calmed down, they calmed down.’
To her surprise, she didn’t mind the maggots wiggling around in her foot. After just a few sessions, her foot appeared markedly better, and ultimately it completely healed. ‘I felt bad that I had to eventually kill them. They’re doing this great treatment to me, and the reward is death,’ she laughs.
How is it that these brainless, disgusting maggots are doing a better job than doctors? Well, they’re hungry.
Maggots are just baby flies that need lots of food, and it so happens that their favorite food is dead tissue. The problem with dead tissue is that it’s pretty hard, like beef jerky, so maggots have evolved little prickly spines along their bodies, and when they crawl around a wound, they gently loosen the dead flesh and separate it away from the living flesh. It’s actually a lot gentler and more effective than a surgeon’s scalpel. Like our babies, maggots can’t chew, so they vomit digestive enzymes onto the wound, dissolving the now-loosened tissue into a tasty slurry, which they can slurp up. Amazingly, these processes spare the living tissue and only really affect dead tissue.
Turns out, maggots don’t want bacteria in their food any more than we do. They have evolved an enzyme called lucifensin, which sits in their gut and kills any bacteria they eat. This enzyme protects the maggot from infections, protecting us in the process. And if that wasn’t enough, maggots stimulate the body to grow more blood vessels at the wound site, thereby allowing more crucial blood flow to reach the wound. How they do this is still a complete mystery. Thus, maggots are debriding wounds better than surgeons, killing bacteria better than some of our best antibiotics, and stimulating blood flow in wizardlike ways. And unlike most doctors, these maggots are dirt-cheap and willing to die for your wound.
Despite this, most patients and doctors remain hesitant to utilize the healing powers of maggots. According to Sherman, ‘Less than 5 percent of patients who are destined for amputation are given a trial of maggot therapy, even though published studies show that 50 to 70 percent of those amputations could probably be prevented.’ Maggots are, after all, completely disgusting to most of us, yet they might just be what the doctor ordered.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/maggot-wound-therapy-what-it-feels-like.html
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG