Conscious Choice: The Buzz on Apitherapy

October 2003

The Buzz on Apitherapy

Healing with the venom of bee stings

by Matt Dueholm

Sybil Meindl is lying on a bed, belly-down with her shirt rolled up, in the treatment room of Betty Yates, an acupuncturist in the Chicago suburb of Bensenville. In the corner, a 10-gallon aquarium is filled with chunks of honeycomb and murmuring honeybees, whose barbed stingers deliver Meindl’s medicine. Using long tweezers, Yates deftly plucks a bee from the aquarium and gets ready to sting Meindl’s exposed back. "It hurts a lot less than giving blood," Meindl says. "And when you know how phenomenal the healing power is, you get used to a little pain."

A car accident in 1996 left Meindl with severe nerve damage and dependant on leg braces to walk. "The pain was so bad that I couldn’t eat," she recalls. "It hurt so much I was constantly crying. I was depressed and thought,‘God, what have I done to deserve this?’ I went from 154 pounds to 114. People looked at me and thought I had cancer."

Meindl’s pain continued to worsen and her doctors had a pessimistic prognosis. "They told me,‘You’d better have your finances ready, because you’re going to be in a wheelchair the rest of your life,’" she says. She found only minimal relief in acupuncture, and her acupuncturist, Yates, suggested in 1997 that she try apitherapy — the use of bee venom as medicine.

Now Yates places a small steel cylinder, cooled in the freezer, for a moment on Meindl’s back to numb the skin, then lightly, almost delicately, taps the bee on the iced circle. The stinger comes out easily and wriggles almost imperceptibly in Meindl’s back. After she stings her patient, Yates puts the now stinger-less bees — which may survive for up to two days — in a jar next to the fish tank and later releases them in her garden. The detached stingers remain in Meindl’s skin about 10 minutes to allow the venom to move into her body.

Yates began stinging Meindl at the end of January 1998 and Meindl stuck with the treatment, even though it didn’t seem to help the first two months. In March, however, Meindl first felt a change.

"I noticed something different about my legs," she recalls. "My legs kept getting better and in October [1998] I got rid of the braces. Now I’m walking up stairs, playing with my granddaughter. I feel almost completely normal."

Meindl, a retired Oak Park teacher, is 63 but looks as if she’s in her 40s. Her face is smooth and wrinkle-free, accented by her thick head of blonde-tinted hair. Her skin is firm and supple. "These stings are a fountain of youth," gushes Meindl, who visits Yates once a week for 13 stings. "My friends think I’m crazy, but my nails are growing; my hair is growing. My energy level is improving. I feel like I’m getting younger. "Now most of my friends are in their 30s and 40s because the people my age — God bless them — just don’t have energy to do anything. I get bored."

Hippocrates Recommended It

Thousands of people suffering from everything from multiple sclerosis (MS) to Parkinson’s disease to cancer have found help in bee stings. Unfamiliar as it is to most Americans, apitherapy is nothing new. The ancient Egyptians and Romans used it to treat arthritis and other ailments. The Chinese reportedly first practiced acupuncture with bee stingers. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates recommended bee venom to treat arthritis and rheumatism. Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne and Russian tyrant Ivan the Terrible relieved stiff joints with bee venom.

In the U.S., the undisputed grandfather of apitherapy was Charles Mraz, who died in 1999 at the age of 94. Mraz was a Vermont beekeeper who realized that the occupational hazards of his job — the frequent bee stings — improved his arthritis. In the 1930s he began stinging people and speaking about apitherapy.

Yates, an acupuncturist for 13 years, learned about bee venom therapy during a 1990 trip to Gungzhou, China, where she received certification. In China, apitherapy, like acupuncture, is an accepted practice. Back in the States, Yates heard about Pat Wagner, aka "The Bee Lady," who was so debilitated by MS that she called herself "a breathing corpse." Wagner found miraculous relief in bee stings and religiously spreads the word — and the bee venom, having stung thousands of people since her 1992 introduction to apitherapy.

Yates began ordering apitherapy books and videos and in 1996 she began experimenting on herself and family members. Stinging her shoulder took away chronic shoulder pain that had bothered her for years. Her daughter was suffering from scleredoma — a hardening of the organs and ligaments — but the symptoms disappeared after three months of treatment, only to return two years later once the stinging stopped.

Since then Yates estimates that she has stung about 100 people. Using the principles of both Eastern and Western acupuncture, she stings her patients either where the pain is felt, at so-called trigger points, or at acupuncture points — energy channels flowing through the body.

Before starting their weekly sessions, Yates asks Meindl where she feels the most pain or tightness. Then she ices her and stings her 13 times, a number they have found to be optimal. This day Meindl feels soreness in her back, hips, and around her foot. Yates stings 10 points on her lower back; the stings redden and swell, forming a sort-of smiley face on her back. Three more stings are applied to her foot and hamstring.

With the exception of Meindl, Yates usually teaches people to use the bees themselves. She first tests the person for allergies to bee stings by stinging the person once and having antihistamines on hand to counter any allergic reactions.

Anecdotes Abound, Science Lags

Bee venom is not an approved medicine and can’t be sold as such. Yates says she takes donations from those who want to give them, but sometimes treats a patient for free. "[Medicine] is about helping people and if a person can’t pay you still have to take care of him," she says. Others offer Yates some gift or service in return. "A woman I treated with Bells palsy looked at the Web site I had and said it was no good so she designed a new one for me."

John Hansen, a beekeeper in LaGrange, supplies Yates with jars full of a couple hundred bees every three weeks. Hansen, president of the Illinois Beekeepers Association, has supplied several people with bees for free or in exchange for small donations.

"For many years I pooh-poohed bee venom therapy," Hansen admitted, but since then he has seen its effects first hand. He says he provided bees for a woman so debilitated by MS that she could not sign her name. She began stinging herself and "three weeks later she sent me the nicest hand-written letter you’ve ever seen." Hansen added that he welcomes the occasional, work-related bee sting. "I’ve been stung so many times I don’t feel it," he said. "Anyway, it’s good for you."

Yates has seen apitherapy work on a variety of ailments that conventional medicine seemed powerless to heal. "It really helped a patient with Parkinson’s disease," she says. "He raved about it. He would have had to go to a nursing home [without the bee stings].

Sufferers of arthritis and MS are the most frequent users of bee venom. Bonnie Sergen of Des Plaines has had MS since 1998. Hansen began giving her bees and a friend stung her 10 times a day, three days a week for five years. "The first time I did it I was sitting on my bed with my legs thrown over the side," Sergen said. "I used to have to pick one leg up and throw it up over the other because I couldn’t cross them normally, but then after someone stung my back, I realized I could cross my leg myself. It was pretty exciting."

Sergen said she stopped using the bee venom several months ago because it stopped having an effect on her, but she stressed that she was in much better physical condition than she’d been five years ago. Now, unlike then, she is able to drive a car and walk up stairs.

Yates says chronic MS patients often reach a point at which progress seems to stop. "If you don’t get any results you can vary the number of stings," she said. "One session you can do five stings, the next session 15. Sometimes that will shock the body into reacting again."

Yates adds that people can tolerate a lot of bee stings — at the beginning Meindl received 28 stings per session — but warns that too much venom will cause flu-like symptoms.

Although some MS patients get immediate and dramatic effects from the bee stings, Yates stresses that patience is a requirement. "For chronic MS, [bee stinging] takes a long time," she explains. "I emphasize that if you don’t have the willpower to stick with it I wouldn’t even start it because it’s going to be a long, time-consuming and painful process."

Though bee venom therapy is well documented throughout history, its effects are not totally understood. "Like all alternative medicines, we don’t really know exactly how it works," said Ross Hauser, M.D., of Oak Park, who practices alternative medicine and studied apitherapy’s effects on 93 MS patients between 1997 and 1998.

Bee venom contains dozens of components, not all of which have been identified. However, Hauser said it is clear that bee venom causes an immune reaction, stimulating various glands and the production of chemicals. The inflammation caused by the stings activates the body’s anti-inflammatory agents.

Hauser said 68 percent of the MS patients in his study showed improvement in their daily functioning, and he has recommended bee venom therapy for a couple hundred patients since the late 1990s, for MS and arthritis as well as sports injuries. Ideally, he said, bee venom would be applied in conjunction with interferon, a conventional medicine for MS. But given an option between the two treatments, he says it’s an easy choice. "If you compare [bee venom therapy] with interferon, it works so much better and it literally costs pennies," Hauser said. "And interferon costs $7,000 to $10,000 a year."

But Hauser said he doubts apitherapy will be given the research it deserves. "Studies take a lot of time and cost a lot of money," he said. He added that the American Medical Association (ama) would never approve bee venom therapy as a valid form of medicine because of its lack of profitability. Apitherapy proponents agree.

"No company is going to spend the thousands of dollars to have this studied if they can’t get anything back," said Reyah Carlson, a beekeeper and ex-nurse in Ventura, California. "You can’t make money off this. This is accessible to everyone — you can have a medicine chest in your own backyard! And you can’t put a patent on a honeybee."

Carlson, who stings people three times a week, said she believes attitudes toward alternative medicine are changing. "People are finding that conventional medicine is only geared toward the short-term," she said. And as bizarre as stinging yourself seems, it is hard to argue with the results.

Ultimately, those whose lives have been changed by the bees don’t care about scientifically proven, double blind tests or ama approval. "People would not sting themselves 20 times with a bee unless they were getting some very real benefit from it," Carlson adds.

Matt Dueholm is a recent graduate of Medill School of Journalism. He now lives with his wife and son in Berlin, Germany.

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