Maggot Therapy

Maggot Therapy, also known as Maggot Debridement Therapy (MDT), is the medicinal use of live maggots or fly larvae for cleaning non-healing wounds.

Medicinal maggots have three medicinal actions:

1. debriding or cleaning wounds by dissolving the necrotic and infected tissue;
2. disinfecting the wound
3. stimulating wound healing.

Maggots have been known to help the healing of wounds for centuries. Military surgeons have long noted that soldiers whose wounds became infested with maggots faired better than soldiers with similar wounds that had not been infested by maggots.

William Baer of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland was the first surgeon to actively promote maggot therapy in 1931.

MDT was successfully and routinely adminstered by thousands of medical physicians until the mid-1940s, when its use declined after new antibiotics and surgical techniques were developed in World War II.

Maggot therapy was occasionally used during the 1970s and 1980s, when antibiotics, surgery, and other modalities of modern antibiotics and surgical techniques failed.

As recently as 1989, military physicians at the Long Beach Veterans Affairs Medical Center in California collaborated with the University of California to further reseach MDT and the early conclusions are that MDT is an effective method to treat patients who would otherwise be subjected to amputations of limbs. MDT may even be preferable to modern surgical and antibiotic treatment in some cases.

References and external links

• Maggot Therapy Project web site