Spinal cord injury patients often succumb to bed sores Christopher Reeve dedicated his final years to promoting cutting-edge research in paralysis, including stem cells and experiments aimed at regenerating the spinal cord. In the end, the star who portrayed the Man of Steel succumbed, like so many people with spinal cord injuries, to an age-old problem: an infected bed sore. "It seems like such a piddly thing to take down Superman," says Jean of Baylor Hospital. "But this is the type of injury that people with spinal cord injuries get every day."

They can be caused by friction, when a paralyzed person slides, or when the body presses on an area and cuts off the blood supply. Tissue can die within hours. If bacteria from infected bed sores spread to the blood, patients can develop sepsis, which is fatal in half of cases. Reeve died at 52 after a system-wide infection from a pressure sore, which led to heart failure and a coma. The actor had battled a number of life- threatening complications after his 1995 accident. In addition to pressure sores, he weathered bone fractures, pneumonia, blood clots, a collapsed lung, repeated hospitalizations and dozens of infections.

Removing necrotic tissue while keeping healthy tissue intact is a major problem for doctors trying to save extremities with open wounds. This study will focus on maggot debridement therapy, (MDT), as an alternative to conventional methods of surgery and antibiotics. For centuries, maggots have been known to have the ability to help in healing wounds much like antibiotics. With the invention of penicillin and other antibiotics, maggot therapy was replaced and its practice becameobsolete. However, in the past 30 years, due to the overuse of antibiotics, large arrays of pathogens resistant to many common antibiotics have developed. Due to this resistance, maggot therapy is once again becoming a viable, first line option for physicians in treating non-healing wounds, especially wounds that typically do not respond to antibiotics or surgery. There are two components to maggot therapy in the treatment of non-healing wounds. [1] The first component is the eating of only the necrotic (dead) and infected tissue and leaving the healthy tissue unharmed. The second component is disinfecting of the wound which helps with healing. [1] These two things together make maggot therapy another option for physicians to help treat wounds.