Bee Venom Therapy Used for Muscular Dystrophy

Do 18 Stings a Day Heep the Doctors Away?
By Benjamin Malakoff, St. Cloud Times (USA), 1/15/2006

SAUK RAPIDS — By August 1999, muscular dystrophy had so severely sapped Kevin Lovitz's muscles that the Sauk Rapids teen-ager hadn't so much as rolled over in bed by himself for a year and a half.

Diagnosed at 6½, Lovitz, 18, was in a wheelchair by 11 and was expected to be gone by now.

But Kevin and his family believe he has been granted extra time by enduring more than 20,000 honeybee stings.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The Lovitzes practice apitherapy, the therapeutic use of bee products such as honey, pollen, beeswax and bee venom for health and healing.

While considered alternative medicine, apitherapy has grown in popularity in the past century. The first World Apitherapy Day is March 30. . .

Kevin has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, one of 36 types of the disease. It is caused by the body's inability to produce the protein dystrophin, which helps produce and maintain skeletal and cardiac muscle. While the bee stings he's endured for the past seven years never stop hurting, they have provided hope to a family who was told there was none. . .

In the spring, Kevin will graduate from Sauk Rapids-Rice High School. His plans thereafter are undecided, but he's grateful to be here. And he may owe a lot of it to the bees.