Healing with Honey

I'm super excited about my latest discovery. We have a boy at NPH with several pressure ulcers. Apparently these ulcers have been a reoccurring problem for him, and right now they've gotten so large that they're threatening to affect his spinal column. For anyone who's never seen one of these delights, allow me to offer a visual demonstration:

(Woohoo! Made you look at something gross!! His is nowhere near that bad, just wanted to give you an extreme example.)

Pressure ulcers are really tough to deal with. You can get them on any part of your body, but they're more common on areas where you're not getting enough blood flow because of constant pressure. For people who lay in bed all day, this can be their hips, sacrum (tailbone) or even the heels of their feet. That's why nurses say it's so important to turn people who are bedridden, it's to give those areas time to get a little blood flowing. For people who are in wheelchairs, this can be really difficult. A lot of times these folks stay in their chairs all day, so their risk of ulcers are really high.

The kid in question has a good size ulcer right now and it's been pretty hard to treat it. We had a meeting in the clinic to discuss what our attack plan was going to be, and the doctor said that we'd be using honey on the wound. I thought I had heard her wrong at first, but after a little research I learned that honey is natural antibiotic and has been used for centuries for open wounds. Russian soldiers used to apply it to their injuries during World War II to avoid fungal and bacterial infections, leading to decreased mortality. Unlike a lot of natural remedies, there's actually a good number of studies proving the effectiveness of the therapy. A study was done a few years ago in Germany that showed a significant increase in wound healing and decrease in reported pain when honey was applied during dressing changes. Here's a tidbit from that:

Overall, wound size decreased significantly during the study period and many wounds healed after relatively short time periods. Similarly, perceived pain levels decreased significantly, and the wounds showed noticeably less slough/necrosis. In general, our findings show honey to be an effective and feasible treatment option for professional wound care.

The nurses here had all experience with honey therapy (called apitherapy) and they were happy to train me. Really it was quite simple, we cleaned the wound like normal, but before we put on the clean dressing we poured a bit of organic honey on the open ulcer. I cringed a little to do that, in my head I was still thinking that we were contaminating it. After a few weeks of adding honey twice a day, I can definitely see a difference in the wound size. Naturally, it's hard to say if the wound is just healing on its own or if the honey is having an effect, but regardless, it definitely not hurting things. Here are some before/after photos that I grabbed online:

I keep thinking of all the elderly patients I had back home with stubborn ulcers and wonder if this could have been a possible therapy option for them. Definitely something that I'll keep in my arsenal for the future!

More information: http://www.honeyo.com/honeyhealing.shtml