A Trial Found Honey Closed 97 Percent of Wounds in Twelve Weeks

• In a small clinical trial, chronic wounds dressed daily with honey closed by 97 percent over twelve weeks, compared with 63 percent for wounds dressed with saline
• By week twelve, no bacteria could be cultured from any honey treated wound, while saline treated wounds still carried Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus saprophyticus
• Granulation tissue, the new tissue that fills a healing wound, covered 90 percent of the wound bed in the honey group compared with 70 percent in the saline group
• A blood marker of inflammation fell from 35 to 5 milligrams per liter in the honey group, versus a drop only to 11 in the saline group
• Patients treated with honey reported less pain and greater satisfaction with their care by the end of the trial

Eighteen patients with wounds that had failed to heal for at least three months were split into two groups at a hospital in Cameroon, and by the twelfth week only one group's wounds had stopped harboring bacteria entirely.

A small randomized clinical trial conducted at Buea Regional Hospital found that chronic wounds dressed daily with raw, unprocessed honey closed by 97 percent over twelve weeks, compared with 63 percent for wounds treated with standard saline dressings. By the same point, bacteria could no longer be cultured from any of the honey treated wounds, while wounds in the saline group still carried Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus saprophyticus.

Researchers randomly assigned eighteen adult patients with wounds present for three months or longer to receive either honey or saline dressings, nine patients to each group, and tracked them weekly for twelve weeks. Wound size was measured with a caliper, granulation tissue was scored visually, and swabs taken at weeks one, six, and twelve were cultured to identify which bacteria remained. Blood tests also tracked C reactive protein, a marker of systemic inflammation, which fell from 35 milligrams per liter to 5 in the honey group, compared with a drop only to 11 in the saline group.

The result adds a rare piece of direct clinical evidence to a body of research that has mostly stayed in the laboratory. Honey's antibacterial action is usually explained by its high sugar content, its acidity, and the hydrogen peroxide its enzymes generate, properties that show up reliably in petri dish studies but are harder to confirm in real patients over real weeks of healing. Here, those properties appeared to translate into fewer infections, faster granulation tissue formation, and patients who reported less pain and greater satisfaction with their care by the end of the trial.

The trial's size is its clearest limit. Nine patients per group, at a single hospital, is enough to suggest a real effect but too small to settle the question on its own, and the researchers themselves called for larger, multi center studies. The honey used was also raw and unprocessed, characterized only by literature values from earlier reports rather than direct testing in this study, a gap that limits what can be said about its exact composition.