What do pacemakers, stents, and artificial hips have in common with leeches and maggots? According to the Food and Drug Administration, they are all medical devices.FDA advisers considering how much scrutiny to give to leeches and maggots used for medicinal purposes yesterday decided they should require a prescription.Leeches have been used by doctors for centuries to control bleeding. Maggot therapy was used hundreds of years ago by indigenous Australians and has been credited with disinfecting the wounds of World War I soldiers who lay untreated for days in battlefields.With FDA approval, doctors now use maggots to trim dead flesh with more precision than scalpels, and leeches to draw excess blood that can collect when severed fingers are reattached.
