You heard me right... honey has the ability (if
that's the right word) to poison you.
But before you go sticking up WANTED posters
of your local bee, don't worry... the honey that's
most likely to cause you harm comes from
Turkey, in a region by the Black Sea.
And it's the flowers that are causing the problem.
Toxins found in local rhododendrons and azaleas
are poisonous to us frail humans. These toxins are
known as grayanotoxins - and just a spoonful of
this stuff can be dangerous.
Symptoms can include hallucinations;
convulsions, low blood pressure and fainting, and
can last around a day.
They call it Mad Honey Disease, and it seems to
be on the increase.
Now before you get alarmed, these numbers are
small. Only 58 cases have ever been reported. But
of those 58, 8 were treated in the last year alone.
And here's the ironic thing... the rise in frequency
has been put down to an increase in the popularity
of natural products!
Still, let's get this in context.
Honey is still one of the most powerful natural
remedies in the world. But if you go to Turkey on
holiday, perhaps you should think twice about
bringing pots of the stuff back as gifts!
That's it for today. Have a great weekend, and I'll
be back very soon indeed.
Years ago my Dad was a timber faller and one day at lunch break he ate fresh honey from a bee's nest in a tree. I believe what he got was hemlock poisoning from the honey and maybe allergic reaction too, but the work crew had to rush him to the hospital. So, yes, there are risks in eating fresh honey sometimes.
It was very serious for my Dad but I was too young to remember all the details. Around that time, my Dad talked the neighbors into letting him put a couple of bee hives in a field by their home. Oh how I loved it when he'd bring home that big deep dishpan full of honey still in the comb! I loved to chew the sweet comb like gum. But it was around the same time that he had the bad reaction in the woods, so that must be why he stopped tending the hives. I never put that all together in my empty head before!
But you will be glad to know, since I believe you suggested it once, that I started taking "Ginkgold" tonight. Tomorrow my phosphatidylserine will arrive that I ordered, and a friend said that it worked to improve her memory. I'll let you know how I do.
Speaking of honey here is a sweet little article that I ran across.
Interesting how new discoveries keep find old cures.
Quote:
By Brandon Keim
01:00 AM Oct, 11, 2006
When Jennifer Eddy first saw an ulcer on the left foot of her patient, an elderly diabetic man, it was pink and quarter-sized. Fourteen months later, drug-resistant bacteria had made it an unrecognizable black mess.
Doctors tried everything they knew -- and failed. After five hospitalizations, four surgeries and regimens of antibiotics, the man had lost two toes. Doctors wanted to remove his entire foot.
"He preferred death to amputation, and everybody agreed he was going to die if he didn't get an amputation," said Eddy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
With standard techniques exhausted, Eddy turned to a treatment used by ancient Sumerian physicians, touted in the Talmud and praised by Hippocrates: honey. Eddy dressed the wounds in honey-soaked gauze. In just two weeks, her patient's ulcers started to heal. Pink flesh replaced black. A year later, he could walk again.
"I've used honey in a dozen cases since then," said Eddy. "I've yet to have one that didn't improve."
Eddy is one of many doctors to recently rediscover honey as medicine. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it.
Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, especially methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, the infamous flesh-eating strain. These have become alarmingly more common in recent years, with MRSA alone responsible for half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms. So-called superbugs cause thousands of deaths and disfigurements every year, and public health officials are alarmed.
Though the practice is uncommon in the United States, honey is successfully used elsewhere on wounds and burns that are unresponsive to other treatments. Some of the most promising results come from Germany's Bonn University Children's Hospital, where doctors have used honey to treat wounds in 50 children whose normal healing processes were weakened by chemotherapy.
The children, said pediatric oncologist Arne Simon, fared consistently better than those with the usual applications of iodine, antibiotics and silver-coated dressings. The only adverse effects were pain in 2 percent of the children and one incidence of eczema. These risks, he said, compare favorably to iodine's possible thyroid effects and the unknowns of silver -- and honey is also cheaper.
"We're dealing with chronic wounds, and every intervention which heals a chronic wound is cost effective, because most of those patients have medical histories of months or years," he said.
While Eddy bought honey at a supermarket, Simon used Medihoney, one of several varieties made from species of Leptospermum flowers found in New Zealand and Australia.
Honey, formed when bees swallow, digest and regurgitate nectar, contains approximately 600 compounds, depending on the type of flower and bee. Leptospermum honeys are renowned for their efficacy and dominate the commercial market, though scientists aren't totally sure why they work.
"All honey is antibacterial, because the bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide," said Peter Molan, director of the Honey Research Unit at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. "But we still haven't managed to identify the active components. All we know is (the honey) works on an extremely broad spectrum."
Attempts in the lab to induce a bacterial resistance to honey have failed, Molan and Simon said. Honey's complex attack, they said, might make adaptation impossible.
Two dozen German hospitals are experimenting with medical honeys, which are also used in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, however, honey as an antibiotic is nearly unknown. American doctors remain skeptical because studies on honey come from abroad and some are imperfectly designed, Molan said.
In a review published this year, Molan collected positive results from more than 20 studies involving 2,000 people. Supported by extensive animal research, he said, the evidence should sway the medical community -- especially when faced by drug-resistant bacteria.
"In some, antibiotics won't work at all," he said. "People are dying from these infections."
Commercial medical honeys are available online in the United States, and one company has applied for Food and Drug Administration approval. In the meantime, more complete clinical research is imminent. The German hospitals are documenting their cases in a database built by Simon's team in Bonn, while Eddy is conducting the first double-blind study.
"The more we keep giving antibiotics, the more we breed these superbugs. Wounds end up being repositories for them," Eddy said. "By eradicating them, honey could do a great job for society and to improve public health."
Xania,
I really can't say that I've noticed any difference since taking Ginkgold and Phosphatidylserine, but I still may have affects from being low on oxygen at times. Also, I'm fighting canker sores in my mouth and fluid draining from my left ear to the point of not being able to hear from it, which has me feeling out of sorts otherwise, so nothing's working right. After struggling for a week to try and get in touch with my naturopathic doctor and the pharmacy and sending the doctor results of blood tests that I payed $156.00 for myself, and doing without medication for two days for T3 and T4, his office left a message that I need to schedule a $50.00 telephone appointment before he can renew my prescription! I think the phone call I make will be to a new doctor! I guess I needed to unload that anger...sorry!
Mad Scientist,
That was an interesting article about honey. Maybe I should pour some in my ear. I'd say the fact that the enzyme enables honey to make hydrogen peroxide gives us a clue. I did use h. peroxide in my ear once. yesterday. It seems to help as much as anything.
$50 phone call just to renew a prescription! Ouch!
For the number of times that friend wife has called her doctor and if he charged that for phone calls I would have to sell the house just to pay him. Plus she actually asks questions about whatever her latest problem is. Yes I would say it probably time to look for a new doctor.
Like honey hydrogen peroxide is one those medicines that modern medicine has all but forgot about, even thought it seems to work quite well in many cases. Of course the fact that it is dirt cheep and no one is going to make a ton of money on it wouldn�t have any thing to do with that, right?
Hopefully that is all that is needed to clear up your ear problem, but I don�t think I would try mixing it with honey.
I read in a magazine article, that if you are having ear problems to try this trick...... fill a clean sock with two cups of salt. tye the sock so that the salt wont fall out.. Heat the sock in a microwave for about two minutes and then lay on your side with the sock on your ear... wait... put the sock down on your bed first, and then lay your ear on the sock... so that way, the warm salt will draw any excess wax or water out of the ear.... I havent tried it yet, but do plan on giving it a try.... Its a cheap easy thing to try, and if it works, one more point for our side...
Hope your feeling better soon!!!!
Ooops almost forgot, have you tried L-lysine for your canker sores? Also vanilla directly on the sores is suppose to help clear them up too.
__________________ God is and all is well
~John Greenleaf Whittier~
just me,
Your remedies sound interesting! I'll have to rummage around to see if I have L-lysine. Do you just swallow the capsuls, or apply it directly? Vanilla sounds yummy...it has a little "medicinal" alcohol in the extract. I'll try the salt with sea salt. I know salt is good for drawing out things and the heat sounds comforting.
Nightowl, swallow the capsules.... When my son starts getting fever blisters or canker sores, he immediatley starts taking it....He use to get fever blisters so bad in the winter time, it was terrible... Almost the whole winter he would fight with them.... Once he started taking the l-lysine, he basically quit having them....
When I was having ear problems last year I used ozone blown into the ear.
This was before I had a medical grade machine. I used the Enlay ozonator at about $50 now. Much less than a prescription considering all the other uses it has. Washing veggies, purifying room odors etc.
I also used H2O2 in my ears. The ozone was a better treatment. I am still working on it. It has pushed the toxins out from the inner ear to the outer ear. All ringing and roaring is gone. Now I am dealing with itch and some inflamation in the outer ear areas. I could actually feel the toxins moving to the exterior of the ear sometimes causing pain. I do think that some of the toxins were eliminated through other channels also. It is a gradual process. People with really bad ears work on it for over a year. Protease enzymes often need to be taken in very high dosages to destroy the toxins as they are released. This is suppose to decrease itching. I haven't done this so far as the itching was/is not that bad for me.
Thanks Arrowwind!
I have shyed away from ozone because I don't understand it and there are so many pros and cons about it. Maybe I should dig a little deeper after reading your post. Can you point me to good articles to read on the internet about it? I'll look up the Enlay one. With COPD, I've heard that breathing ozone is harmful....is this true?
Since this thread is about honey, I wanted to share a great site I just found on the subject, and it has a lot of useful information.
Mad Honey Disease
nightowl
Linear Mode
