Maggots and sugar

I always love to read the Health pages in the weekend paper. How do you manage your health?

With Transition The Grove we always have an eye to the future and for planning ahead to build local resilience and to reduce our dependence on imported oil.

Although it is not immediately something you think about with health our health system is a huge mega-system that is vastly top-heavy and dependent on big resources to keep it running. If it isn’t brought under some control it will simply end up gobbling up the whole of our GDP! Of course we can’t afford for it to do that. We have to learn to manage our health and wellness and fitness my more locally much more cost-effectively and to take more responsibility for keeping outselves fit and well rather than expecting the health system to be able to patch us up later regardless of how we have chosen to live our lives.

Rather than thinking of this as a big stick more and more it makes me very excited. The reason is simple: Thinking about health through the filter of thinking about what we can do locally taking responsibility for ourselves without a whole lot of dependence on surgery and pharmaceuticals turns up masses of empowering answers. Many of them very simple.

In fact at the same time as the answers about how simple it is to be healthy locally there is also an enormous amount of information telling us of the dangers of consuming too much of the big end of town’s health products. The Therapeutic Goods Administration has been in the news criticised for not having to take a stronger line in relation to assessing medical devices ranging from heart valves to bandages and hip implants including the De Puy hip implant that led to heavy metal poisoning pain and the need for another replacement and on-going physiotherapy for many people. Also the CSL drug company’s swine flu vaccines that were linked to febrile convulsions in under-fives. The Pharmacy Guild is also being criticised for trying to avoid a Senate inquiry. It is one of the most powerful lobby groups and the question is whether taxpayers are getting value for money from the $15 billion deal between the government and the Guild. Repeat admissions to hospital for hospital-gained conditions is very frequent as is admission to hospital for side effects of medications wrong doses and drug interactions.

So knowing some of the local health ways will not only be simpler in many circumstances it might well result in us being quite a lot weller. Not always but often.

So here are two things we can do locally that I have come across:

These are for healing wounds especially serious long-term wounds like the ulcers on the legs of diabetic patients that result in them losing part of a limb like a foot.

The first is maggots! Yes you heard correctly maggots. This is not high-tech. There is no need for it to cost you an arm and a leg and the risk of other damage. It is really low-tech old-fashioned and apparently very effective. They have a medical term for it now: maggot debridement therapy or MDT (in capital letters) for short. There is now a lot of medical research showing that maggots are very effective in healing chronic long-term leg and foot wounds even when all other treatments have failed. People who have lived with open wounds for years with all the pain the odour may well be helped by this. The “yuck factor” needs to be got over because it is such an effective treatment.

Maggot debridement therapy uses live maggots to clean out the ulcer. They wriggle nibble disinfect clean and heal the wound clearing dead tissue and bacteria and stimulating growth of new tissue. The maggots reduce odour levels and also decrease the pain levels. They are particularly effective for pressure ulcers diabetic foot ulcers and non-healing traumatic or post-surgical wounds. MDT can achieve amazing results. They can avoid amputation or at least delay it so the person can live the rest of their lives with their limbs intact.

The other local therapy I’ve come across for wounds and ulcers is sugar. Common house sugar. The type you might put in a cup of coffee. It is reported to be a miracle healer too healing where all else has failed. You can find the reference to this on the Transition The Grove’s Health Forum along with dozens and dozens of other great local health possibilities.

While we’re on the subject of health I’ll share with you another thing that is available locally. Acupuncture. We have a number of local acupuncture practitioners who you can find in Transition The Grove’s Health Directory – try the search function for ‘acupuncture’ is probably easiest. I’ve been receiving acupuncture to release some tension out of parts of my spine. It is very effective but it does need someone trained in the techniques. Acupuncture is ancient medical wisdom from the east. It is certainly not ‘high tech’ yet it seems to me to tap into a very deep knowledge and understanding of an aspect of our bodies that Western medicine is only gradually coming to respect. Once again it doesn’t fit the pharmacy and surgery model of most of our high cost medical system but it is available locally is very low risk and is pretty jolly effective.