Ronald A. Sherman

Importance to Hirudotherapy

Ronald A. Sherman is an American researcher affiliated with the BioTherapeutics, Education and Research (BTER) Foundation in Irvine, California (PubMed affiliations 2009 and 2014), whose reviews trace the modern revival of maggot therapy. Writing in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology in 2009, he placed the field eighty years after William Baer presented his work treating bone and soft-tissue infections with live maggots, and attributed the treatment's renaissance to technological advances: reliable access to a perishable medical device, simplified application, low-cost production and modern dressings that minimise the risk of escaping maggots. He noted that dozens of laboratories worldwide, supported by overnight courier services, had made medicinal maggots readily available, and that studies show fears of patient non-acceptance to be unfounded (PMID 20144365). In a 2014 review in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine he examined the three mechanisms attributed to medicinal maggots — debridement, disinfection and hastened wound healing — drawing on controlled clinical studies and laboratory investigations of maggot–host interactions at the cellular and molecular level. He concluded that clinical and laboratory data strongly support effective and efficient debridement, whereas clinical evidence for hastened healing remains meagre, with laboratory studies and small replicated clinical studies suggesting that maggots promote tissue growth during and shortly after their presence on the wound, and he proposed employing maggots as a 'maintenance debridement' modality beyond the point of gross debridement (PMID 24744812). His relevance to hirudotherapy lies in the biotherapy field he helped organise; ASH's statements about his editorial and society roles remain subject to ongoing source verification.