Background

This article is intended to be a refresher course on apitherapy,1,2 a type of health treatment utilizing bee products, including bee venom. Incidentally, another term ๙apiotherapy๛3 is used in the international medical dictionary (but not anywhere else) and it denotes treatment with bee venom containing apitoxin. The present author, however, prefers the term apitherapy. Hormesis and homeopathy signify biological mechanisms that might be involved in the therapeutic use of bee venom as follows:4,5

Hormesis6 is the term for generally favorable biological responses to low exposures to toxins and other stressors; it has the opposite effect in small doses as in large doses. The biologic response phenomenon characterized by low-dose stimulation or a high dose inhibition results in either a J-shaped or an inverted U-shaped dose response.

Homeopathy7 is a system of therapeutics in which diseases are treated with drugs which are capable of producing in healthy persons symptoms like those of the disease to be treated, the drug being administered in minute doses in succession. Professor Dr. Fang Zhu, President of the Kunming-basedInternational Apitherapy & Bee-Products Society (IABPS), has been recognized as the first modern medical doctor to have introduced in China treatment techniques using bee materials.