ChuckD
The Gay Lord of Freestyle
Bee stings....
Pat Wagner is known as the bee lady. While most people try to avoid bee stings, Pat says they have saved her life.
In the midst of a tough battle with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 42, Pat was about to die. She was unable to walk, barely able to move, and her body was emaciated.
But then, a family friend offered an odd remedy. To give her a bee sting. That's when things took a miraculous turn. All of the sudden, she had feeling and warmth again in the area of the sting.
DR. Wayne Olan says there might be something to Pat's therapy.
Bee venom contains melatin, an anit inflammatory more than 100 times stronger than any steroid. That subsance, coupled iwth a natural pain reliever in the venom could be why more and more people are seeking out Pat to relieve automimmune conditions like arthritits and LouGherig's disease.
Leeches....
In 1994, a woman's scalp was ripped off when her hair was yanked into moving machinery. Doctors performing micro-surgery at the University of Southern California reattached the scalp, but one area swelled with congested blood. They applied leeches, one at a time for eight days, to suck up stagnant blood. Eventually new capillaries, or tiny blood vessels, formed in the scalp wound, leading to healing circulation.
Is something repulsive going on? All leeches have two suckers — one on each end of its body — and the mouth end has hundreds of teeth. When applied to an injury or reattached limb, leeches dig their teeth right into the flesh and start sucking. Surprisingly, the bite doesn't seem to hurt. That's because leech saliva contains a natural anesthetic, or pain-killer.
Leech saliva is also full of other important curative chemicals. One is called hirudin, which keeps blood from clotting. Scientists have devised a method to genetically engineer hirudin, which they hope to prescribe as an alternative treatment for unclogging blood vessels during heart surgery.
Another leech benefit is an agent that prevents bacteria from infecting the wound area. And a third is a vasodilator, which causes human blood vessels to open. "Leeches are like a mini-drugstore, because of the 'cocktail' of chemicals within their systems," says Anna Baldwin at the Biopharm Leech Center in Charleston, South Carolina. The potent leech cocktail seems to promote the circulation of blood critical to healing a wound. By the way, when a leech has finished sucking your blood, it simply falls off. How comforting!
Maggots...
Today, more than 200 hospitals in the U.S. and Europe have prescribed maggots to treat patients with infections from injuries like pressure ulcers ("bed sores"), leg and foot ulcers, stab wounds, and post-surgical wounds that won't heal.
Open, untreated wounds can become infected and gangrenous if left untreated. Gangrene is the death of human cells or tissues caused by a blockage of blood supply to a wound. If gangrenous tissue isn't removed, the affected limb eventually begins to rot. And if bloodless tissue should become infected by poisonous bacteria such as clostridium, results can be fatal.
Young blowfly maggots are implanted directly onto a wound, where they eat dead flesh, clean out dead skin, and kill harmful bacteria that need injured tissue to survive. Once maggots reach their fill of dead and dying flesh, they're removed from the wound and new maggots are applied. Blood can then flow throughout the tissue, promoting the growth of new flesh.
Pat Wagner is known as the bee lady. While most people try to avoid bee stings, Pat says they have saved her life.
In the midst of a tough battle with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of 42, Pat was about to die. She was unable to walk, barely able to move, and her body was emaciated.
But then, a family friend offered an odd remedy. To give her a bee sting. That's when things took a miraculous turn. All of the sudden, she had feeling and warmth again in the area of the sting.
DR. Wayne Olan says there might be something to Pat's therapy.
Bee venom contains melatin, an anit inflammatory more than 100 times stronger than any steroid. That subsance, coupled iwth a natural pain reliever in the venom could be why more and more people are seeking out Pat to relieve automimmune conditions like arthritits and LouGherig's disease.
Leeches....
In 1994, a woman's scalp was ripped off when her hair was yanked into moving machinery. Doctors performing micro-surgery at the University of Southern California reattached the scalp, but one area swelled with congested blood. They applied leeches, one at a time for eight days, to suck up stagnant blood. Eventually new capillaries, or tiny blood vessels, formed in the scalp wound, leading to healing circulation.
Is something repulsive going on? All leeches have two suckers — one on each end of its body — and the mouth end has hundreds of teeth. When applied to an injury or reattached limb, leeches dig their teeth right into the flesh and start sucking. Surprisingly, the bite doesn't seem to hurt. That's because leech saliva contains a natural anesthetic, or pain-killer.
Leech saliva is also full of other important curative chemicals. One is called hirudin, which keeps blood from clotting. Scientists have devised a method to genetically engineer hirudin, which they hope to prescribe as an alternative treatment for unclogging blood vessels during heart surgery.
Another leech benefit is an agent that prevents bacteria from infecting the wound area. And a third is a vasodilator, which causes human blood vessels to open. "Leeches are like a mini-drugstore, because of the 'cocktail' of chemicals within their systems," says Anna Baldwin at the Biopharm Leech Center in Charleston, South Carolina. The potent leech cocktail seems to promote the circulation of blood critical to healing a wound. By the way, when a leech has finished sucking your blood, it simply falls off. How comforting!
Maggots...
Today, more than 200 hospitals in the U.S. and Europe have prescribed maggots to treat patients with infections from injuries like pressure ulcers ("bed sores"), leg and foot ulcers, stab wounds, and post-surgical wounds that won't heal.
Open, untreated wounds can become infected and gangrenous if left untreated. Gangrene is the death of human cells or tissues caused by a blockage of blood supply to a wound. If gangrenous tissue isn't removed, the affected limb eventually begins to rot. And if bloodless tissue should become infected by poisonous bacteria such as clostridium, results can be fatal.
Young blowfly maggots are implanted directly onto a wound, where they eat dead flesh, clean out dead skin, and kill harmful bacteria that need injured tissue to survive. Once maggots reach their fill of dead and dying flesh, they're removed from the wound and new maggots are applied. Blood can then flow throughout the tissue, promoting the growth of new flesh.