Bee venom therapy may give new hope to arthritis sufferers.

By Charles Downey

WebMD Feature

Louise Chirasello of Brewster, New York, was suffering intractable pain from her two hip replacement operations. She tried to get relief from the strongest prescribed painkillers, and from physical therapy.

But nothing worked. "I was so sore, you could not touch my hips without me crying out," says Chirasello.

Then she heard about Lawrence Cohen, a doctor in Danbury, Conn., who treats terrible pain with the venom of ordinary honeybees. At first, Cohen gave the 84-year-old widow several injections of bee venom weekly, but eventually reduced the dose to one injection every two or three weeks.

"Right after I got that first injection of bee venom, I left his office pain-free," Chirasello says. A year later, she is still free of pain and has needed no additional bee venom injections.

Unproven Results

Although bee venom therapy is largely an unproven technique, about 50 U.S. physicians report good results using the substance to treat not only pain but arthritic conditions, multiple sclerosis, and other health woes. Other practitioners treat high blood pressure, asthma, hearing loss, and even premenstrual syndrome with bee venom.

According to Christopher Kim, medical director of the Monmouth Pain Institute in Red Bank, N.J., bee venom therapy has been around for thousands of years. Reference to the treatment can be found in ancient Egypt and Greek medical writings. Also known as apitherapy, the technique is more widely used in Eastern Europe, Asia and South America.

Treatments supposedly started after beekeepers, who were stung many times, noticed their arthritis pains were relieved. Some practitioners still use live bee stings to deliver the venom.

Most Got Better

Kim, who has administered apitherapy to 3,000 people, published a two-year study on 108 rheumatoid and osteoarthritis patients who had not responded to convention treatments. Starting with twice-weekly injections, he gradually increased the number of shots until the patients improved significantly. Most subjects showed improvement after an average of 12 injections.

In his article -- printed in the March 1989 issue of the German journal, Rheumatologie -- Kim concluded that apitherapy was safe, effective, and free of serious side effects.

But evaluations of most U.S. medical treatments are based on double-blind studies -- where neither the subject nor researcher knows who is getting the real medicine or a placebo. Most reports about bee venom therapy are anecdotal. Even those studies looking at more than one patient, such as Kim's, have not included a placebo group for comparison.

"It's very difficult to find a placebo substance that will mimic a bee venom injection or sting with its itching, redness, and swelling," says Kim.