Therapy a sweet success

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By Ann Geracimos

Common sense and medical care don't often go together - for good reason. A complex illness usually requires a host of complicated treatments.

There are exceptions, however, as Dr. Christopher Attinger realized when confronted with a challenging sore on Joshua Pennington's foot that just wouldn't heal. Dr. Attinger, director of Georgetown University Hospital's Center for Wound Healing, was ready to try anything as a remedy - even honey.

According to Mr. Pennington, 63, a retired gym teacher who lives in La Plata, Md., the patient in this case was the teacher. Mr. Pennington had heard from a friend who raises bees about the curative effects of certain kinds of honey - primarily darker honey - and sought Dr. Attinger's advice before trying it.

"He said to go ahead, that Egyptians were using it over 4,000 years ago. He was willing to step outside the box," Mr. Pennington recalls.

The wound was an especially nasty one, caused by an accident three years ago. Mr. Pennington had been mowing grass when a stone had flipped up, struck his foot and caused an open wound. Georgetown clinicians had tried without success to help him by using bioengineered skin treatments known as apligrafs, but two of these had not been effective. He says his case might have been complicated by the fact that the wound was over the site of a skin graft done in 1999 for a different problem.

"He did not have good blood flow in that area, and there was no way to get it better," confirms nurse practitioner Kara Couch of the wound center. "That is why we tried so many kinds of treatments, including hyperbaric," in which patients are treated with 100 percent oxygen in a pressurized chamber.

"Real credit goes to Dr. Attinger," Mr. Pennington says.

It so happened that a prescription-only honey-infused bandage called Medihoney, granted preliminary approval by the Food and Drug Administration in November, was already in Georgetown's arsenal, and the hospital claims to have been the first in the country to use it. Made by a firm in New Jersey called Derma Sciences, the bandage is technically a highly absorbent seaweed-based product soaked with Leptospermum honey produced from the oil of tea trees in Australia and New Zealand.

Bees take the oil from the tree and convert it into what is called manuka honey, which contains the healing ingredients.

"It looks like a Fruit Roll-up, about the size of a four-by-four gauze pad," Mr. Pennington says.

This particular kind of honey - related to an over-the-counter brand of honey also called Manuka - has naturally occurring antibacterial properties, the reasons for which are unknown. It also does not allow for bacterial resistance, as many other antibiotics do, and thus is greatly useful in countering the dreaded methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) superbug, according to Georgetown clinicians.

Mr. Pennington "healed a lot with Medihoney," Ms. Couch says. "In chronic wounds, you expect a 10 to 20 percent positive response in a week, but in three weeks, he had healed 90 percent, which is huge."

Besides helping close the wound, the honey bandage acts as a barrier to keep out harmful bacteria.

"We like to say that 'everything you learned from your mother, you should do the opposite,'" Ms. Couch says, as mothers typically would say leave the wound open to allow it to heal, but ideally it should be closed.

Apparently, the word is out about Medihoney.

"A lady called us wanting to get MediHoney bandages for her dog," Ms. Couch relates. "We told her to check with her veterinarian."

The recent scare in this country about the mysterious disappearance of bees from their hives doesn't have any impact on supplies, says Joe Sandoli, Derma Sciences' sales director. New Zealand, he says, "has stringent requirements against any potential influence that could affect their agriculture." Hence, it has stayed free of the problem.

He also cautions against using store-bought honey for medicinal purposes.

"The last thing you want to do is put raw honey that hasn't been sterilized on a wound and invite an infection," he says.