Many years ago, I returned back home to visit my family and prior to all of us taking a hike in the woods together, I offered to make a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- you know, the ultimate stick-to-your-ribs energizing power bar. I pulled a jar of peanut butter out of the fridge, unscrewed the lid and my knife came to a screeching hault when I noticed about 45 tiny wriggling maggots inside. My eyes apparently popped out of their sockets because after noting my distress, my father calmly peered inside the jar for confirmation, spirited it away in under 1.3 seconds flat and then telepathically instucted me to never reveal the horror to my mother. What housefly larvae were doing inside that jar of Jif I will never know, but it took me close to 1 year to even consider making another PB & J sandwich again and an additional 14 months to finally eat one. Even though maggots are pretty much defenseless baby fly worms that don't even have any teeth, to most of us, they are the stuff that nightmares are made of.

Quite fond of hanging out around dumps, landfills, areas with excrement -- all the places that make us instinctually gag -- they make a meal out of things that we would never even dream of consuming (peanut butter not withstanding). Voracious eating machines, they are programmed to gobble up decaying flesh while secreting digestive enzymes that dissolve the dead tissue and can grow exponentially in size just 24 hours after pigging out. Despite the ewwwwwws that may be spiraling throughout your mind, we should actually praise these toothless wormy wonders because they are singlehandedly responsible for cleaning up the organic mess that we've left behind. While it may seem absolutely horrific, modern medicine has actually taken note of their innate abilities by employing sterilized creepy cream-colored crawlers on a regular basis to disinfect people's chronically problematic wounds and accelerate healing.

This is nothing new, though...it's just new to us. Ancient healing techniques regularly involved the use of maggots to clean up dead flesh on perfectly alive human beings. The worms want nothing to do with healthy tissue, which makes them highly targeted eaters and they end up doing a far more effective job than what modern medicine can when it comes to certain extreme gangrene
and diabetic wound scenarios. Countless antibiotics are oftentimes still no match for the simple yet incredibly effective disinfectant powers of maggots.

They are apparently in good company with leeches, which are notable for their anticoagulant, vasodilator and anesthetic filled saliva that could pave the way for more effective treatments for cardiovascular diseases such as strokes and heart attacks. Even though they have a proboscis, three mouths and millions of little teeth, you theoretically can't feel leeches attaching themselves because they release a natural anesthetic which makes their presence nearly undetectable (the video clip below seems to dispute that to some degree). The close relative of the earthworm has been famously used as far back as 1000 B.C. to draw blood, but modern studies are recognizing that reconstructive surgery patients or those who have had limbs or appendages reattached may be find leech therapy particularly useful. Since leeches feed on blood, it makes sense to utilize them following reattachment surgery since they can clean up the excess that pools in the area, enabling the micro-veins to have a chance to heal and ultimately do their job.

So which one will it be for you, maggot or leech therapy? From an environmental standpoint, utilizing these natural wonders is as eco-friendly as it gets, even if the thought of exposing your ailing body to writhing wrigglers makes your skin crawl. With no unnecessary drugs, surgery, or extraneous bandages needed, it's just you and the worms...mano a mano. It's becoming more mainstream considering the fact that approximately 2000 medical centers in the US and Europe have been employing maggots since 2008. Leeches are also regularly being used to detoxify blood in Austria (Demi Moore is a huge fan), treat hair loss and decrease pain and stiffness in joints due to arthritic conditions. Britain's Biopharm is making a lucrative business out of supplying tens of thousands of leeches every year to hospitals in dozens of countries. Sounds intriguing, right? If you were faced with a medical condition that warranted maggot or leech therapy, would you happily submit knowing that they are an infinitely greener way to heal the body?