Maggots make medical comeback

Aug. 2, 2004 | WASHINGTON (AP) -- Think of these wriggly little creatures not as, well, gross, but as miniature surgeons: Maggots are making a medical comeback, cleaning out wounds that just won't heal.

Wound-care clinics around the country are giving maggots a try on some of their sickest patients after high-tech treatments fail.

It's a therapy quietly championed since the early 1990s by a California physician who's earned the nickname Dr. Maggot. But Dr. Ronald Sherman's maggots are getting more attention since, in January, they became the first live animals to win Food and Drug Administration approval -- as a medical device to clean out wounds.

A medical device? They remove the dead tissue that impedes healing "mechanically," FDA determined. It's called chewing.

Please treat me with some worms please. The article said that this treatment takes allot of convincing for its patients. I don't know how willing I would be to do something like let maggots live inside me for a few days. I think that mentally I would feel like I had died. Maggots remind me of death and erosion of the body. But actually, I would be literally be "eatten alive". If these stump eroding worms have real hollistic purposes, I say yeah to Dr. Maggot for healing those who have tried everything else.