Honey and Medicine: Past, Present and Future

P C Molan, Professor of Biological Sciences and Director of the Honey Research Unit University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of abstracts from the 1st International Conference on the Medicinal Uses of Honey (From Hive to Therapy) held by Universiti Sains Malaysia in August of 2006. The abstracts have been published by the Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences (Vol.14 No.1, January 2007).]

Honey is one of the oldest medicines known, its recorded use going back more than 4 millennia. It was used to treat wounds and ulcers, sunburn, and infections of the eyes, throat and gut. These uses have continued into present-day folk medicine and are increasingly becoming part of modern professional medicine.

Good results have been reported in modern medical literature on the use of honey in ophthalmology and gastroenterology. The use of honey as a wound dressing has always been part of professional medicine, but it was displaced from common usage by the advent of antibiotics.

Now that antibiotic resistance in bacteria is becoming a major world-wide problem there is a rapidly increasing move towards using honey to clear infection in wounds, with no adverse effects on wound tissues.

Additional to using honey’s antibacterial activity, advantage is being taken of its other medically beneficial bioactivities: a rapid debriding action, a stimulatory effect on growth of tissues for wound repair, an anti-oxidant activity and an anti-inflammatory action, which minimises scarring.

There is a large amount of evidence for its effectiveness that has been published in recent times-reports of animal model and clinical studies, case reports and randomised controlled trials showing that honey is more effective than modern pharmaceutical products in managing wounds.

In cases where the long-forgotten ancient wisdom of using the best types of honey in formulations to keep it in place on a wound has been heeded, results obtained have been exceptionally good. Various wound-dressing materials manufactured from honey are now on the market in various countries as registered medical devices.

At the research level, honey is currently showing potential to also be useful for minimising damage to skin and mucosal surfaces from radiotherapy, treating gingivitis, treating viral infections, and combating cancerous tumours.

It is predicted that in the future it will be widely used prophylactically to prevent infection of patients with “superbugs” in hospitals, and will come into use as standard treatment for: leprosy; for all surgical wounds to prevent infection, prevent scarring, and speed healing; for burns, to prevent infection and prevent further damage to tissues caused by inflammation resulting from the thermal damage; to minimise burning from radiotherapy for cancer; to minimise effects on the gut of chemotherapy for cancer; and will be fully accepted by the medical profession as a legitimate modern medicine.