People Are Stinging Themselves With Bees at Home to Treat Lyme Disease

...The protocol is known as bee venom therapy (BVT), and among those afflicted with chronic Lyme, it’s gaining a lot of adherents. They call themselves “stingers.”

“I meet online two or three new people every week who I haven't found before, who are doing BVT,” she said. “Most people, if not everyone, say that they're improving.”

The claim is difficult to measure because chronic Lyme is not recognized by the medical establishment as existing at all. In other words, one can’t be recovering from a disease that most doctors simply won’t diagnose.

“The chronic Lyme label seems to be a convenient way to attribute very nonspecific symptoms that may have nothing to do with Lyme disease,” said Dr. Asim Ahmed, an infectious diseases expert at the Boston Children’s Hospital. “And it's just medically unaccepted as a diagnosis.”

The stingers of course don’t buy that, and are in a sense willing to prove it by stabbing themselves with pulsating venom sacs multiple times a week, sometimes for years...