INSECT REMEDIES

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 December 1937, Page 8

INSECT REMEDIES

DR. BEE AND HIS • STING

To-day we can amplify the answer

to the question. “How doth the busy little bee improve the shining hour?” For in addition to gathering honey, he stores in his sting a. poison iwhich is of great value in the treatment ' of chronic rheumatism, .sciatica, lumbago, and neuritis, as this article by Roger Simonet, condensed from “Sciences et Voyages,”- Paris, recounts.

As early as 1855 a French doctor, Demartis, was employing bee poison to treat skin cancer, in 1903, Terc (of Marburg, Styria), reported to a society of physicians at Vienna the results of twenty-three years of practice in the -successful treatment of acute articular rheumatism by means of bee stings. He considered bee poison to be a precise cure for this ailment, and even as a means of diagnosis,' since it proved less effective against muscular rheumatism and neuralgia. In applying the treatment, Terc caused the patient to be stung near the affected joint by a number of bees, and the number of -stings in, each dose was gradually increased to 70. After the stings were given, the pains soon went away, and to obtain a cure more treatments' were used.

Although direct treatment by the bees is not nearly, so barbarous as it may sound, and is accepted by the most difficult patients, there are nvertheless, cases of hypersensibility' to the poison, and these cases require close medical supervision. At first the dose is light, with some interval of time taken to note the effect. Some patients begin treatment with a dose of 10-20 stings; and some German doctors advocate doses of 100-200 stings a day. But where the treatment is not urgent the: dose begins with one bee, which is then increased to five.

“Bears,” said Pliny, “which have become too fat, go purposely to disturb a hive of bees in order that they may sting him many times, especially on the muzzle, for this is beneficial to him.” To-day medicine does not prescribe such a cure for obesity, but it does attribute four therapeutic properties to bee poison.

.1 It acts as a general tonic. Apiculturists claim that after receiving accidental bee stings they feel more vigorous, more agile, and longer winded. Some claim, that it makes for old age.

2, It acts notably as a 'revulsive, with power to divert a, disease from an organ in which it. seems to have settled.

3. It has anti-infectious properties, and is said to have cured cases of plague, cholera, acute bronchitis and ophthalmia.

4. Finally, liee poison is an antiihcumatic agent of the first importance.

It is not yet known to what ingredient bee poison owes its therapeutic effects, nor what particular actions govern its success and limitations.