Originally published September 7 2005
FDA to consider maggots and leeches in the medical world
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
As more surgeons turn to old methods like the use of blood-sucking leeches to drain excess blood from transplanted or reattached body parts and flesh-eating maggots to clean festering wounds, the FDA is trying to establish guidelines on how they can be safely grown, transported and sold.
Flesh-eating maggots and bloodsucking leeches were once the tools of medieval doctors and shamans.
But they have experienced a quiet renaissance among high-tech surgeons, and for two days beginning today, a federal advisory board will discuss how to regulate them.
Leeches, it turns out, are particularly good at draining excess blood from surgically reattached or transplanted appendages.
Maggots clean festering wounds that fail to heal, as happens among diabetics, better than almost anything in use, although the use of maggots in the United States has been slight, in part because of squeamishness.
Those already on the market had to prove their worth; those invented later had to get approval before marketing.
But there are unexplored corners of the nation's medical market -- no one knows how many, but they are certainly a vanishing few -- in which doctors and manufacturers have been doing business since well before 1976 without much notice from the FDA.
Bone wax -- made from beeswax, olive oil and phenol -- is commonly used by surgeons to stop bones from bleeding or reknitting.
Officials first had to decide which part of the agency had oversight -- its biological or device division, said Mark Melkerson, acting director of the FDA's division of general, restorative and neurological devices.
George Washington is said to have died after physicians used leeches to drain him of quarts of blood during an illness.
When reattaching or transplanting an appendage, these surgeons are often able to stitch together arteries, which deliver blood to the appendage and are thick-walled and relatively easy to suture.
This cocktail encourages fast bleeding to empty the appendage of extra blood, reducing pressure and allowing veins to form on their own.
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