Posted without comment, other than to say that a therapy’s clinical effectiveness is not necessarily proportional to its degree of high technology.
A week of wound debridement using maggots cleared necrotic tissue more effectively than conventional debridement in patients with chronic venous ulcers, a randomized French study showed.
At day eight of treatment, the percentage of the wound area covered by slough was 54.5% in patients given maggot therapy compared with 66.5% (P=0.04) of the wound area in a control group, according to Anne Dompmartin, MD, PhD, of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Caen, and colleagues.
However, there was no difference between the groups in percentage of the necrotic tissue on the wound at day 15 (55.4% versus 53.8%, P=0.78), which was the study’s primary endpoint.
Bottom line: your wound can heal with either type of therapy, but it should heal somewhat more quickly with the maggots. This would seem to be a good example of the need to consider patient preference in the decision on therapeutic strategy.
