A patient receives a bee sting administered by a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine at a clinic on the outskirts of Beijing.
Patients in China are swarming to acupuncture clinics to be given bee stings to treat or ward off life-threatening illness, practitioners say.
More than 27,000 people have undergone the painful technique – each session can involve dozens of punctures – at Wang Menglin's clinic in Beijing, says the bee acupuncturist who makes his living from believers in the concept.
But except for trying to prevent allergic reactions to the stings themselves, there is no orthodox medical evidence that bee venom is effective against illness, and rationalist websites in the West describe so-called "apitherapy" as "quackery".
0 comments:
Post a Comment