What is it about?
Maggot therapy has been growing rapidly in many countries, but especially in large cities. Because maggot therapy requires no electricity, expensive medical equipment or highly trained personnel, it is ideal for areas of the world where such resources are limited. In this article, we see how health care providers in the Islamic Republic of Iran effectively used these qualities of maggot therapy to treat chronic non-healing wounds not only in the big cities but also in rural villages, saving dozens of limbs from amputation.
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Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This publication is important because we can see how simple and effective maggot therapy can be for treating serious chronic wounds - including many with bone infection (osteomyelitis). All of the wounds healed, even though they had not responded to conventional medical and surgical wound care, even though many were otherwise scheduled for amputation, and even though many of the subjects were outpatients living in rural areas, far from specialized wound centers.
Perspectives
It was an honor and a privilege to be invited to participate in this project: assessing the impact of maggot therapy on wound care in the Islamic Republic of Iran. For several years, Dr. Mirabzadeh and his team had been using maggot therapy to treat chronic non-healing wounds of patients who had failed multiple medical and surgical attempts to close their wounds. All of the patients had bone infections (osteomyelitis), and many were referred for amputation. The results of that work, after review and analysis by our team at the BTER Foundation, demonstrated that all of the wounds were healed after a course of maggot debridement. Not a single limb in this series required amputation, even though many of the wounds were initially felt to be unsalvageable. Another valuable lesson that was clearly demonstrated in this case series was that even when maggot therapy was administered in rural areas by minimally trained family members, wounds healed despite failing to do so when previously cared for by highly skilled professionals using advanced wound care technologies in a modern tertiary care center in Tehran. To this day, looking at the "before" and "after" photographs fills me with a sense of awe and inspiration.
Ronald A Sherman
BioTherapeutics, Education & Research Foundation
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Maggot therapy for wound care in Iran: a case series of the first 28 patients, Journal of Wound Care, March 2017, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/jowc.2017.26.3.137.
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