American Apitherapy Society President Interviewed on CBS

What's All the Buzz About?
CBS Sunday Morning, 8/20/2006

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Dr. Andrew Kochan, an Encino, California, pain management specialist, and President of the American Apitherapy Society, is one of about twenty MDs in the United States who use the venom from bee stings extensively in their practices. He keeps a box of bees in his office, obtained from a local beekeeper.

Kochan says he's had significant success treating the excruciating pain of shingles.

Curtis Jenson went to Kochan for headache pain after having a brain tumor removed.

"I have to take anti-seizure medicine for the rest of my life and the less medication I have to take the better," Jenson says. "So as soon as they started doing the stingings, my pain definitely did drop."

For literally millennia, people have been taking advantage of what beekeepers discovered by accident — Alexander the Great, Confucius, even Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, used bee-sting therapy for pain. Bee venom it turns out is a powerful anti-inflammatory, and honey heals infections. It seals a wound, kills the bacteria, and then actually creates hydrogen peroxide.

"I mean, I'm not just a proselytizer for venom," Kochan says. "Bees have five, six different products. Five, six different things they make that have amazing effects to help people and help their lives and help their pain and their health and well being."…