26/05/2025
The bees have given us many important things for our health, but we are finding out more and more that bee medicine has tremendous powers.
Especially when it comes to common conditions that are not managed well by western allopathic medicine. These include arthritis, bursitis, multiple sclerosis, essential tremor, Parkinson’s, and various forms of cancer.
Bee venom has shown itself to be very helpful as it has many pharmacological actions which are little understood, so I’ll try to offer a simple explanation here.
Firstly, the bee venom has many actions that are analgesic- quickly relieve pain. Contrary to conventional understanding, it is bioavailable to the human body, and bee venom therapy works by gradually building up doses, appropriate to the individual and the condition being treated.
Next, bee venom has impressive abilities to repair connective tissue and fine vascular parts of the body. This is why it is incredibly helpful for treating arthritic knees, and bursitis affected parts of the body. It makes short work of the common, painful condition of frozen shoulder. It can be very helpful for diabetic foot conditions and gout.
Bee venom is known to be very soothing on the brain and has shown tremendous benefits in calming neural inflammation. Researchers at the Russian institute of Apitherapy presented a study in 2023 showing how Apitoxin, bee venom, used on acupuncture points, reversed all the symptoms of Parkinsons: the gait, the tremor, slurred speech, in 1200 Russian subjects. They also report great benefits in the treatment of depression and acne, using bee venom.
Bee venom is frequently combined with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) acupuncture in China, Korea, and many other parts of the world. In China, live bees are used in TCM clinics and the many specialist Apitherapy hospitals that form part of the medical system. Referred to as “bee needle,” bee venom is commonly used on key acupuncture points to add extra power to already potent acupuncture therapy. In 2023, I had the good fortune to attend some TCM clinics in China where doctors routinely step onto hospital balconies to retrieve more bees for medicine to be used in the clinics.
Patients with multiple sclerosis, cancer, arthritis, gout, rhinitis and many other common conditions attended the TCM clinic regularly to receive acupuncture utilising “bee needle” and they reported excellent results. The treatment has been used in Chinese medicine for over 3,000 years so its use does not raise eyebrows the way it does in the west.
For Lyme disease, bee venom is one of the few treatments that aggressively kills off the Borrelia burgdorferi spirochete that so invades the tissues of Lyme sufferers. For them, bee venom can be a challenging but rewarding treatment. Many have fully recovered from Lyme either by direct stinging with live bees, or a regime of bee venom injections. Patient’s with Lyme often have additional co-infections as the Borrelia burgdorferi habitually create biofilms within the body and encourage nesting of additional parasites. Frequently, Lyme patients also have infections caused by mold or fungal infections. Bee venom is very good at helping to clean this up and practitioners should work with the patient to help es**rt the killed off parasites and harmful toxins from the body. Lyme patients frequently suffer the famous Herxheimer reaction at this phase of the treatment – which can be very distressing but effectively shows the patient the treatment is working. Therefore, bee venom is very successfully used in conjunction with oxygen therapies such as plasmapheresis, ten pass blood ozone and other very helpful oxygen and detox therapies.
In the treatment of cancer there are numerous studies confirming that bee venom causes apoptosis, programmed cell death, of tumours. Increasingly it is being studied and trialled in many countries for breast, prostate, liver, lung and skin cancer. Positive results are recorded and hundreds of studies can be viewed in a simple search for bee venom therapy on PubMed or Google Scholar.
In China, stage 4 cancer patients may receive up to 60 bee stings daily. Chinese oncologists report that patients are encouraged to have beehives where they live so they can comfortably carry our this “natural chemo” treatment at home. They suggest phasing it into three lots of 20 stings per day, some advise putting some honey or propolis on the area being stung to reduce localised pain from the immediate sting.
For generalised pain or common illnesses, bee venom therapy (BVT)is regarded as a highly successful and powerful medical treatment by the 80 odd countries that have adopted Apitherapy into their medical systems. Used in conjunction with other bee medicine treatments such as nebulising bee propolis, having honey massage for detox or as dressing for wound healing and consuming the bee superfoods of bee pollen and Royal Jelly, BVT is a powerful immune booster and successful medicine to achieve strong recoveries.
We need to encourage countries that do not know or recognise Apitherapy to welcome this powerful medicine into their treatment regimes. As the Internet has made the world a smaller place, these important discoveries are being made by discerning patients who are increasingly requesting bee venom therapy. For patients with common conditions, the allopathic options are frequently less than successful and quite toxic to the body. If you had arthritis, MS, cancer, Parkinson’s, depression, rhinitis, or essential tremor, why wouldn’t you give it a try?
Dr Bridget Goodwin is an Integrative Medicine Doctor, board certified in the USA and Canada and currently working in Mexico. She is the founding President of the Australian Apitherapy Association and one of four Vice Presidents of the International Federation of Apitherapy
