Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995                   TAG: 9501240026
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DON'T SQUIRM

For you iron-bellies who remain, we ask you to consider one object of great promise in the high-tech medical world of the '90s: maggots.

Your revulsion is understandable. Because of penny-dreadful tales with descriptive passages about "maggot-infested bodies" and associated horrors, maggots generally are viewed with disgust. But they are victims of bad press.

That, and the fact that they do eat rotting flesh, thrive in filth and have a repulsive, wormlike appearance.

We must put all of that aside. For maggots also are natural surgeons, a fact known since Napoleonic times but one that most everyone associates with primitive medicine on a par with using leeches. Which, come to think of it, were used recently in Norfolk to restore blood circulation in a reattached ear.

Similarly, maggot therapy is being rediscovered by a small number of doctors to fight gangrene, bed sores, all manner of wounds and infections.

This may sound like some yarn from the supermarket tabloids, but no less respectable a newspaper than the Wall Street Journal has reported the case of a diabetic man with a gangrenous leg that was close to being amputated. After five months of maggot treatment, the leg was saved and the patient had partial use of it.

(Don't try this at home. These maggots were sterilized at a certain stage in their development, introduced into the wound, and monitored by a doctor.)

Medicine's maggot maestro, Dr. Ronald Sherman at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif., quite sensibly asks why, if the therapy is effective when all else fails, it is not used as more than a last resort. He says the treatment is low-cost, requires no anesthesia, heals wounds with minimal scarring and has no apparent side effects.

Too icky? Well, for an increasingly antiseptic society grown too far removed from nature, and careless of the gifts offered in its glorious grubbiness, an occasional diversion from daintiness may be just the medicine.