A Welsh firm breeding maggots to heal wounds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Skip to 9:22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z0HsGX6IGU
> "People are shocked at how effective it is,"
Im not sure if I have the stomach to handle 4 days of maggot-patch, but it has very much occured to me that we are really really bad at woundcare, that there is very little to deal well with dead skin (debridement). And that that is a huge limitation of healing.
I have high respect for the old ways here. Trying to figure it out again, make use of this technique, sounds like it could be a major win... just... sedate me heavily please.
EDIT: Hmm, it seems like from the article that they have access to the dead tissue but through a porous type material, and apparently consume the dead tissue by liquefying it with enzymes first and then "drinking it", so not quite as direct as I remembered I guess.
> ...greenbottle fly larvae are grown in the lab, disinfected, and put into finely woven net pouches about the size of a teabag that are then placed on patients’ wounds for four days. The maggots work their magic through the material and the bags are removed before they turn into flies.
> As larvae feed on dead tissue in a wound, they release chemicals that break down dead tissue into a liquid that they drink, according to Chelsea and Westminster hospital, which offers larval therapy. They also take up bacteria, which are destroyed within their gut, but do not eat healthy tissue. When applied to the wound the larvae are the size of an uncooked grain of rice, and grow to around 10-12mm during treatment. They cannot bite, since they do not have teeth, and they cannot multiply.
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Ah, I see I was thinking they are directly on the wound bed because of this video I was remembering, but the video actually shows naturally appearing maggots (aka not intentionally placed there): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxzciEVJGwY (not for faint of heart)
Not my area of expertise but I wonder why they cant just extract or synthetically produce this enzyme for topical application and whick the liquified tissue with guaze.
Not a fan of maggots.
It's in the works, according to the article. They're hoping for oral application too
The article mentioned "Some may feel a tickling sensation.."
I think this is one of those I would have to "lean in" to and watch them crawl around. Like anything with needles, I have to watch them draw blood or give the shots, otherwise its so much worse
[edit: just kidding].
https://www.emilio-moriguchi.or.jp/disease/doc/moist_eng.pdf
^ Seriously these slides are incredible, check them out! In particular slide 42 shows the result of almost an entire finger tip being regenerated near perfectly. When I first saw the slides my jaw dropped, it seems like the type of thing that only reptiles are supposed to be able to do. Note that the finger could only be regenerated because there was a tiny part of the nail bed remaining; without that the body would have lost the genetic information to reconstruct the finger tip properly.
TL;DR: Moist wound heal by coating the wound in aquaphor (or pure petroleum jelly aka vaseline, but I prefer aquaphor due to its semi occlusive nature rather than fully occlusive as well as a couple of additional anti inflammatory compounds in aquaphor like bisabolol), then cover the wound with saran wrap, or a transparent film dressing like tegaderm, or a hydrocolloid like duoderm extra thin cgf (if using hydrocolloids you can omit the aquaphor because the hydrocolloid won't stick as well and also the natural fluid secreted by the wound fulfills the same role).
The result of this healing method is fast, low-pain, low-scarring wound healing.
An important part of the approach is to never use topical antibiotics nor soap, since those damage the body's wound healing cells more than they retard the pathogens.
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As for maggot therapy specifically, it works for wounds with necrotic tissue. The maggots eat the dead tissue and leave the healthy tissue completely intact. So it's not necessary for burn wounds.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9323726/#:~:tex....
Curious on how maggots and leeches may overlap with their medical uses?
Maggots can be gross when seen en masse in the “wild” but I’d probably be fine with using them in controlled environments.
I think very little.
I have no relevant expertise, but I think maggots are used mainly because they eat dead flesh - good for cleaning out necrotic wounds.
IIRC, leeches are used in the modern era for the impacts they can have on your vascular system (since they've evolved to suck blood, they have some interesting biochemistry around that, IIUC).
There are some quite disgusting parasites out there:
It works because the maggots eat the necrotic tissue but not the healthy tissue, so they're extremely effective for debridement.
I had some actual notes of research papers related to maggot therapy but those are stuck on a laptop that's in the shop right now so, no sources from me today.
On the topic of wound healing more generally, check out the slides I linked to here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482547
I've personally used these moist wound healing methods to heal all manner of wounds of mine (lacerations, abrasions, and burns) with minimal scarring (and FWIW I'm someone that scars quite readily).
It's very sad to me that proper moist wound healing is insanely cheap and effective but most people [at least in America] are brainwashed to use several ineffective strategies:
- triple antibiotic ointments like neosporin which do not outperform petroleum jelly in RCTs; all the benefit of neosporin comes from its use of white petrolatum as the carrier gel. The actual antibiotic portion doesn't help and in a small subset of people causes allergic reaction type issues.
- gauze, which dries out wounds and makes them heal worse. For 99% of everyday wounds one of either hydrocolloid or transparent film dressings is all you need, and can be changed quite infrequently (every few days at most for hydrocolloids, if used on the right wounds ie wounds that have mild to moderate amounts of exudate)
- washing wounds with soap, which needlessly retards the healing process. All you need to do is rinse a wound with normal water to get any dirt or debris out, apply aquaphor or pure petroleum jelly and cover it with a dressing. Moist wound healing makes wounds heal at least 2x as fast as dried out wounds. Notably, if a wound ever forms a scab that is a sign that you screwed up by letting the wound dry out. Properly taken care of wounds never form scabs. For the same reason, the somewhat common practice of "letting a wound breathe" by removing the bandage and leaving it uncovered (I was told to do this overnight by my mom growing up for example) should never be done. Keep the wound moist and covered during the entire wound healing process, only changing the dressing when necessary.
MWH was initially proven effective in Winter's 1962 paper "Formation of the Scab and the Rate of Epithelization of Superficial Wounds in the Skin of the Young Domestic Pig", which showed wounds healing ~twice as fast when kept moist compared to control.
Isnt there an increased risk of infection with moistness if not careful?
I think people default to the dry approach because it's easier to not cock up.
>Another area of research focuses on maggots’ wound-healing properties. “Clinical and anecdotal evidence suggested that maggots improve or accelerate and stimulate a wound to heal,” says Nigam. “We were really interested in why this could be possible when that’s of no evolutionary interest to the maggot at all. We’ve discovered that it’s more than likely an inadvertent happening. > >“The growth factors [hormones] that are produced have a very similar structure to the human molecules and that is how perhaps by accident the human wound is stimulated to heal faster. We’re going to investigate that further.”
"The growth factors [hormones] that are produced have a very similar structure to the human molecules and that is how perhaps by accident the human wound is stimulated to heal faster."
No idea how you got from that to "evolution can't even explain the origin of species", but it seems to me you're not exactly looking for truth here.