Maggot therapy
Overview
Maggot therapy is a type of biotherapy
Biotherapy
Zootherapy is the use of living animals for medical treatment or as an adjunct to medical diagnosis.-Overview:Zootherapy is the use of living organisms to diagnose, treat or cure disease or disease symptoms...

 involving the intentional introduction of live, disinfected maggot
Maggot
In everyday speech the word maggot means the larva of a fly ; it is applied in particular to the larvae of Brachyceran flies, such as houseflies, cheese flies, and blowflies, rather than larvae of the Nematocera, such as mosquitoes and Crane flies...

s (fly larvae) into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wound(s)
Wound
A wound is a type of injury in which skin is torn, cut or punctured , or where blunt force trauma causes a contusion . In pathology, it specifically refers to a sharp injury which damages the dermis of the skin.-Open:...

 of a human or animal for the purpose of cleaning out the necrotic
Necrosis
Necrosis is the premature death of cells in living tissue. Necrosis is caused by factors external to the cell or tissue, such as infection, toxins, or trauma. This is in contrast to apoptosis, which is a naturally occurring cause of cellular death...

 tissue within a wound (debridement
Debridement
Debridement is the medical removal of a patient's dead, damaged, or infected tissue to improve the healing potential of the remaining healthy tissue...

) and disinfection. It was long believed that the debridement is selective on necrotic tissue but this has been questioned by recent literature.
Written records have documented that maggots have been used since antiquity
Ancient history
Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, with Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing, from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC...

 as a wound treatment.
 
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