Bee sting-new treatment regimen for arthritis, multiple sclerosis

Pune, May 13 While most of us rush to the doctor if stung by a red coloured wasp, there are others who wait for the bee keeper to remove a live bee from its hive with a pair of tweezers, hold it next to the skin and wait for it to sting. And they do it as part of a treatment regimen - apitherapy, the medical use of honeybee products that include the use of honey, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and even bee venom.

Dr Mukund Bhide, a software consultant from Mumbai should know. Suffering from multiple sclerosis, Bhide has had a prolonged battle with the disease for several years and after watching a television programme that spoke of the benefits of apitherapy, he started his own search for a place that could offer live bee stings.

Bhide zeroed down to Pune-based Central Bee Research and Training Institute (CBRTI) and urged the officials to administer live bee stings. “I was really fed up with this pain. I could not walk properly and had to drag my feet despite my crutches. So when the road to modern medicine has its limitations I decided what harm could a bee sting do,” asks Bhide.

A year and five sessions of some 50 bee stings each later, Bhide craved for more. But the CBRTI Director M T Wakode is cautious. “We have so many enquiries from patients who are rheumatic and suffer from arthritic disorders. While claims of apitherapy have not been proved to the scientific standards of evidence-based medicine and are anecdotal in nature, there are a wide variety of conditions and diseases that have been suggested as candidates for apitherapy, the most well known being bee venom therapy for auto-immune diseases and multiple sclerosis,” says Wakode.

Bhide who had taken a break for some months wants to get back to the institute again for his share of bee stings as he feels the progression of his disease has been arrested. “Yes, there were side effects like nausea and fever and the initial scare of being stung by a bee. Slowly though it did not matter and there was relief from the pain. I could even walk without support,” says Bhide.

Says Dr Arvind Chopra, rheumatologist and director of the Centre for Rheumatic Disease Patients, “I have had a lot of people asking about bee stings. These are unproven therapies and hence we caution patients. People can have a severe allergic reaction to bee stings and in extreme cases can even result in death. While there may be several satisfied patients, a systematic study needs to be done to evaluate the therapeutic value of bee stings.”