Summary:
Discusses the benefits of alternative healing, specifically, the benifits of apitherapy, or bee venom therapy. Explores research on the practice and details the medical conditions on which it is used.
According to the website article by Glen Rothfeld M.D., bee venom can be used as an alternative method of healing. This method of healing is referred to as Apitherapy, or bee venom therapy. It contains many useful substances, and can be helpful in a broad variety of medical situations.
Honey bee venom has over eighteen different active substances that make it so useful. Among those, is Melittin, which is a very powerful anti-inflammatory. Bee venom also contains things such as Dopamine, Norepinephrine, and Seratonin (Rothfeld, 2004).
The most frequent uses of bee venom therapy is for things like arthritis, tendinosis, scar tissue, and multiple sclerosis (Rothfeld, 2004). I think that it is reasonable to try when nothing else works. When performing apitherapy, a person simple holds a bee with tweezers and makes it sting you in the desired area. The more you sting depends on the problem. There are some doctors who obtain bee venom in vials and inject it under the skin (Rothfeld, 2004).
The scariest thing about the bee venom therapy is that it can be preformed by anyone who is taught to use the bees. It does not seem humane to allow someone to repeatedly make a bee sting you. How does someone even know how many times are appropriate to sting and where to do it at? There is not a license that is required, so there is no way of finding out if the person is qualified or not.
I guess that you could say I am skeptical about this method of healing. It seems painful, and I also think that things could go wrong. What if the person was allergic to the venom or if there body simply rejects it? I think that there needs to be more research before this can be used in an actual doctors setting. I also think that a license of some sort should be required in order to legally perform the therapy. I think that it is cool that someone studied the therapy, and found out the venom can be useful in different ways. The article did not really give the negative effects that this could have (if any), and that is something I would be interested in finding out.
This is the complete article, containing 369 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
