A Truly Revolting Treatment Is Having a Renaissance
In its larval stage, Lucilia sericata looks unassuming enough. Beige and millimeters long, a bottle-fly grub may lack good looks, but it contains a sophisticated set of tools for eating dead and dying human flesh. The maggots ooze digestive enzymes and antimicrobials to dissolve decaying tissue and to kill off any unwanted bacteria or pathogens. Lacking teeth, they use rough patches on their exterior and shudder-inducing mandibles (called “mouth hooks”) to poke at and scratch off dead tissue before slurping it up.
This flesh-eating repertoire is hard enough to stomach in the abstract. Now imagine hosting it on your skin. “Not everyone, psychologically, can deal with that sensation and knowing maggots are chewing on their flesh,” Robert Kirsner, the director of the University of Miami Hospital Wound Center, in Florida, told me. This is the barrier that advocates of maggot therapy face: the emotional gravity of pure human revulsion.
How to convince a maggot-hesitant patient? “I would say, ‘Please give me just 24 hours of your life,’” says Kosta Mumcuoglu, a parasitologist and medical entomologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Tomorrow at this same time, I will come back, and you can decide how to continue.” In that period, a smattering of maggots, about 32 to 50
