Hundreds of years ago, maggots, leeches, and dirt were "medicine cabinet" staples. Now old is new again. Alternative folk cures were standard medical fare for centuries. But late-19th-century advances like the theory--keeping and instruments from germs promotes healing--and 20th-century drugs called antibiotics, helped banish folk remedies from modern hospitals. Now, recent studies suggest some old remedies may do the trick as well as, or better than, some techniques that replaced them. We no longer think of antibiotics as the cure-all for every infection.
Almost by chance we are relearning that nature's medicines -- often called `gross'--are sometimes the best. Maggot and leech therapies are a growing trend though you probably won't find them in your local doctor's office. Doctors are likely to turn to maggots and leeches only when nothing else works. Today, as in the past, maggots are used to eat dead tissue, thereby cleaning open wounds. During the Civil War and again in World War I, battlefield physicians saw that soldiers' wounds infested with maggots tended to heal better than non-infested wounds. Soon maggot therapy was born (Root-Bernstein, Root-Bernstein, 1997).
On the other hand, leeches were put to the test in a practice called phlebotomy, or bloodletting, a remedy once as popular as aspirin. A leech's bite was only one tactic used to drain human blood--knives, sharp stones, teeth, and thorns also proved popular. Though they didn't know why at the time, doctors found bloodletting reduced severe fever. A doctor might use leeches to drain ounces or pints of blood--in extreme cases, up to 1/5 of a person's total blood supply! Today, leaches are making a comeback in reconstructive surgery when, for example, surgeons reattach a severed finger (Duke, 1991).
Today, more than 200 hospitals in the U.S. and Europe have prescribed maggots to................
