Medicinal Honey - An Expert Opinion

The Health Benefits of Honey are my true passion, although all the benefits of honey are quite astounding!

Any books I manage to get my hands on about this subject attract me like "Bees Around a Honey Pot"

Whilst flying to France a few years ago I took along a book to read written by Joe Traynor who named his book "Honey the Gourmet Medicine".

My flight just flew by, so engrossed was I in this book about medicinal honey they had to practically beg me to leave the plane once we had landed!

I have used an excerpt from this small but extremely interesting little book (with the author’s permission) and written a short article here for you to read.

These are Joe’s words and his take on medicinal honey. I do hope you enjoy reading it as much as I.

The great number of positive studies on the medicinal benefits of honey, virtually all of them from outside our borders, should encourage U.S. scientists and doctors to investigate honey more thoroughly.

Certainly there needs to be more controlled scientific tests on the medicinal benefits of honey and much more work on developing a product with uniformly high antibacterial activity.

Such studies will be costly and the honey industry, beleaguered by low prices because of global competition, does not have the resources to fund such tests although, to their credit, honey producers are funding a few.

America is currently spending $14 million + to evaluate the effectiveness of glucosamine to treat arthritis. Why not fund studies on the effectiveness of medicinal honey on a number of maladies?

If honey became an accepted medicine in the U.S, think of the billions of dollars that could be saved – dollars that would otherwise go to prescription drugs.

It’s not too far fetched to think that if honey became an accepted medicine; our economy would become more stable and our country more productive.

A healthy population provides tremendous economic benefits. It has been estimated that a meagre 1% reduction in the mortality rate of cancer alone would have an economic value of $500 billion + to the U.S.

Play a word association game with the word “honey” with doctors around the world: the most frequently associated word for U.S doctors might well be "Botulism;" for New Zealand doctors, "Medicine;" for German doctors, "Health;" and for French doctors, "Treat." Honey still lies well outside the mainstreams of medicine in this country (U.S.)

Eliminating the botulism stigma from honey, which in my opinion is vastly overstated in the first place, by using only gamma-irritated honey in medical experiments, should allow U.S. medical scientists to explore honey’s benefits with impunity.

My background is in horticulture and over 20 years ago, a respected horticultural scientist encouraged his students to think outside the box. His comments are just as applicable to young medical students today:

(W. Grierson): "It is a foolish young scientist who does not learn that the Court of the Inquisition still sits in judgment on the unorthodox. In 1616, it forced Galileo to submit to the orthodoxy of the theologians. Today’s equivalent comes from a web of bureaucratic rules and policies.

All are well-intentioned, but their cumulative effect is to exert a powerful pressure towards orthodoxy. Our bright young people need to be allowed a little more freedom and a chance to prove themselves original thinkers without the system whipping them into traditional, sometimes unimaginative channels".

Does such a climate as described exist today? You bet it does! Witness the reaction when it was proposed by Australian Barry Marshall that the bacterium, H. pylori was the main cause of ulcers.

The poor man was pilloried (if not pyloried), especially in the U.S.’ for daring to question an accepted doctrine of the medical establishment, thereby questioning the establishment itself.

Fortunately Marshall had the stomach (and I mean literally had the stomach: he swallowed a solution laced with H. pylori to prove his point; wouldn’t that make a good book or movie?) to pursue his hypothesis to a successful resolution.

More recently, Paul Ewald endured blows for proposing that microbes cause most human ailments. It is hoped that a young U.S. medical student (or future medical student) will read this book and other work, and in an appropriate situation ask his mentor "I’ve got a bit of honey here. Why don’t we try it, just to see what happens".........!