Published 27 May 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b2098
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b2098

Letters

Larval therapy for leg ulcers

Study authors respond to points in editorial

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In the editorial accompanying our three papers on leg ulcers, Grey and colleagues make several points that deserve reply.^{1 2 3 4}

They do not like our selection of time to healing as the primary outcome in the larval therapy study, but debridement is practised precisely because it is thought to aid healing. They claim that debridement "is more valuable to clinicians," but is it more valuable to patients if it is not associated with quicker healing? We are baffled by their declaration that "it may be unrealistic to use complete healing as the primary outcome measure in wound healing studies, and time to healing may be an equally valid outcome measure" because time to healing was our primary end point, and, anyway, both complete healing and time to healing rely on the occurrence of healing.

We used extremely broad inclusion criteria for the larval therapy trial. The main reason for exclusion was . . . [Full text of this article]

¹ Department of Health Sciences, University of York, York YO10 5DD, ² School of Healthcare, University of Leeds

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