Maggotts should not be used to clean open wounds
Often when maggotts are found in a resident's pressure ulcer (normally caused by the lack of proper wound care and cleaning), the nursing home tries to argue to the family that the maggotts are a method of cleaning the wound and that the nursing home intended the maggotts to clean the wound (despite no physician order typically). Well, that frivolous argument has now been proved wrong.
Reuters had an article about a recent study in the British Medical Journal of the world's first controlled clinical trial of maggot medicine. Maggotts may clean wounds quicker than normal treatment but this does not lead to faster healing. Some patients also found so-called "larval therapy" more painful.
To find out more, researchers at Britain's University of York recruited 267 patients with venous leg ulcers and treated them either with maggots or hydrogel, a standard wound-cleaning product. They found no significant difference in outcomes or cost. Larval therapy works because maggots eat only dead and rotting tissue, leaving a clean wound. They do not burrow into healthy flesh, preferring to eat each other when they run out of food.
