Honey
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Here’s something interesting: like leeches and maggots but far less icky, the medicinal use of honey is making a resurgence:
bq. Abandoned with the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s and subsequently disregarded as folk quackery, a growing set of clinical literature and dozens of glowing anecdotes now recommend it. Most tantalizingly, honey seems capable of combating the growing scourge of drug-resistant wound infections, especially methicillin-resistant _Staphylococcus aureus_, or MRSA, the infamous flesh-eating strain. [...] Though the practice is uncommon in the United States, honey is successfully used elsewhere on wounds and burns that are unresponsive to other treatments. Some of the most promising results come from Germany’s Bonn University Children’s Hospital, where doctors have used honey to treat wounds in 50 children whose normal healing processes were weakened by chemotherapy. [ "Honey Remedy Could Save Limbs":http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,71925-0.html ]
It’s nice to see some scientists willing to give folk remedies a shot, especially when they turn out to be effective like this. The lesson here is that maybe our pre-scientific ancestors actually knew a thing or two, and maybe we shouldn’t be so eager to sneer at old practices just because they don’t yet have the blessing of the scientific method.
??Photo: “Honey”:http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=221960413&size=s by “Nictalopen”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/nictalopen/??
