Engineers don’t do skin grafts and doctors don’t build bridges

Medical Inspection Confirmed Infection

Honey healed a crater in my leg

A fairly good reproduction of my accident, followed by a profusion of pure Anglo-Saxon — Produced using ChatGPT (Open AI)

Preamble

I recently came across a local beekeeper one Sunday morning here in Brisbane. He was selling jars of honey at one of our nearby food markets. As I’m always up for a chat, and have had a long held interest in bees, their hexagonal shaped hive cells, and the liquid gold that they produce, we started ‘chewing the fat’, ‘shooting the breeze’, having a ‘tit for tat’, about the benefits of honey, what it is, and how these tiny creatures go about their buzziness. I won’t bore you with the full details, but here’s an ‘edited’ summary:

• There’s only one queen bee, and she rules the hive while the workers are all males and either ‘bring home the bacon’, or they’re out on their little stingers. [I wonder if the male workers, who travel up to 5km per day, come back to the hive because they’ve pollen in love with her?]
• The workers bring nectar from plants and trees, modify it using enzymes in their stomachs, dry it back in the hive, and next thing …

“Holy gee! Thank you, bee” — there’s honey!

• Then there’s Manuka honey …

“… a rare, premium honey made by bees that pollinate the Manuka bush (Leptospermum scoparium), native to New Zealand and Australia.”

[A more common name for manuka is the ‘tea tree’, since the early settlers used its leaves to brew what they mistakenly thought would pass for tea. Remember here that many of these ‘settlers’ had been transported to this then inhospitable ‘Lucky Country’ down-under for such abominable and nefarious crimes as stealing a loaf of bread or poaching rabbits to fend off starvation, and therefore were none too choosy when it came to tickling their taste buds with a cup of the local non-equivalent of English Breakfast, Earl Grey, or Lapsang Souchong.]

• Manuka honey is much more viscous than other honeys, is typically much darker, and has a particularly strong flavour. It is, however, typically a lot more expensive than other honeys, depending upon how far away from New Zealand or Australia you are located.

But enough hilarity (for now at least). This chat about bees, honey and tea tree pollination got me thinking about an accident I had many years back, and how I stumbled upon a magical cure for wound infection.

The Accident

While trimming some hedges in the garden of my former house (refer title image/cartoon), I was standing on the bottom rung of my aluminium stepladder, bouncing up and down in a rather futile attempt to obtain a stable base on uneven ground. I was less than half a metre off the ground (about a foot and a half for my non-metric American friends).

All of this sounds pretty harmless so far, eh? Wrong!!!

Next thing, quick as a lizard drinking, or as rapid as a rat running up a drainpipe, or as brisk as a bride’s dress dropping on her wedding night, I was lying on my back in agony. I immediately jumped up and started hopping around, like a bush kangaroo on sun-baked concrete, nursing the outside of my battered lower leg, which was red raw and painful.

It’s times like these when polite words fail and profanities kick in. A veritable profusion of fluent Anglo-Saxon expelled itself from my mouth, silencing the late afternoon jovial chatter of the kookaburra lazily perched on the branch above my head, not to mention disturbing the neighbours.

It took me a while to work out that the bottom of the ladder had sheared away sideways downslope, taking my feet with it. But the real damage came when the thin flat metal tray, which forms the top of every step ladder, came crashing down on me, skidding across my top few layers of leg skin, intent on finding an anchor (my leg) to stop its downhill run.

OK, the bleeding wasn’t too bad, so a bit of direct pressure on the wound did the trick, while hopping around (in the kitchen now) grabbing some ice in a tea towel. “She’ll be right” (famous Aussie understatement), yep “she’ll be right,” I muttered more to convince myself than anything else, “if I just keep the ice on for a while”. Grin and bear it is the manly thing to do. Plenty of ice to keep the bruising under control.

“Better see the doctor,” came sage advice from my long-suffering better half.

“Nah, she’ll be right. Only a shallow flesh wound”, I retorted, now reverting back to intelligible English, of sorts.

The Gruesome Details

Well, next day of course ‘she’ was far from right, nor was ‘she’ right the next day, and no amount of self-administering could prevent my leg from swelling up like a hot air balloon and a huge bruise forming from my ankle to my hip. I had had the good sense to put some iodine on the wound and cover it with a dressing, but it later transpired that a nasty infection had set in, irrespective. Incidentally, bruises aren’t always black and blue. This one was an unsubtle blend of both, but punctuated by streaks of yellow, pink and green (just for the artists out there).

When I eventually fronted up to the doctor, several days later, he immediately put me on antibiotics. Of course, the first batch didn’t do the trick and several trips later, followed by an X-ray to ensure the infection hadn’t reached the bone, a course (or three) of different antibiotics, and things were eventually starting to settle down. I was left, however, with a rather large hole in my leg, due to the infection creating, for lack of a better analogy, a mini explosion on the side of my leg. I had to change the dressing daily and the scene that greeted me under the old one wasn’t pretty, much like a pothole in a muddy, gritty dirt track, or a crater surrounding an erupting volcano.

I trust nobody reading this is having dinner (or breakfast depending upon your time zone), but I promise you there is a point to this whole (or is it hole) story.

The Healing

My then family doctor, an expat Singaporean, knew me well and delighted in the usual lecture on the inappropriateness of self-healing.

“Would you, Mr Engineer, ask a medic to build a bridge?”, etc, etc. I may have retorted with something like, “I’m more than capable of doing my own skin grafts, thanks,” but time has thankfully blurred any reliable memories of my idiocy.

Anyway, in between the usual banter about medics and engineers, he starts babbling on about honey. I think he must be pulling my leg, as Singaporean Chinese are renowned for humour and chit chat. Perhaps I misheard him, although his English is impeccable; no ‘*Chinglish*’ language here.

“What’s that, doc, eat more honey? Does that improve circulation?”

“No”, he retorts, “The bleeding has stopped, so you spread it on your leg when you change your dressing daily. Sally [his nurse] will show you how.”

Still unsure of this advice from left field, I do what any sane self-practitioner would do. I Google it. So next visit to the doc, I’m full of the pros and cos (well mostly pros) of Manuka honey and have downloaded a couple of papers from the Nursing Times, which I show him impressively, probably hoping to convince myself rather than anyone else that we are, well he is, on the right track.

“Don’t need those, Mr Engineer. Eastern medicine has been using honey for thousands of years for slow healing wounds. It’s a natural antiseptic, prevents infection.”

Anyway, long story short, my leg eventually came good and the skin, very slowly but magically, grew back into and across the craterous hole, thanks to the amazing healing effects of the honey. I have been left to this day, however, with a large pink bare patch, with no manly leg hair and devoid of melanin, not to mention smooth as a baby’s bottom, literally. It could have been worse, though, it could have been my face, although some might say that would have been an improvement, in my case.

Why Does Honey Heal?

Modern Western culture has been slow to accept the healing powers of honey, even though many sources cite ancient literature as documenting honey’s wound-healing activity (eg honey was reportedly used for wound healing in ancient Egypt a few thousand years ago). It appears that the natural antibacterial qualities of honey were not ‘discovered’ by Western researchers until the late 19th century. These late comers on the honey healing homepage reported that the healing properties of honey are due to the following:

• its antibacterial activity;
• it maintains the wound in a moist condition; and
• it forms a viscous protective barrier to reduce the risk of infection.

The antibacterial activity is apparently due to the production of hydrogen peroxide, which happens in most honeys.

Why Invest in Manuka Honey?

In Manuka honey, significant antibacterial effects are displayed even when the hydrogen peroxide activity is blocked, thus making Manuka honey unique among honeys. Furthermore, unlike conventional antibiotics, Manuka honey has not been reported as causing ‘superbugs’ resistant to antibiotics after multiple treatments.

Here I must add that my ex-Singaporean GP advised me to use any honey from the supermarket. Sally, however, the astute nurse at that general practice, did drop hints that I might consider splashing out on medical-grade Manuka (a not too small undertaking for me, a former Scotsman, whose tendency to part with additional funds can be likened to prising a bone from the mouth of a bulldog).

My later research backed up Sally’s valuable advice. Furthermore, with the number of rather shady honey vendors on the retail market these days, and their propensity to dilute honey with other products, regular supermarket-bought (not beekeeper provided) honey may contain spores or contaminants. I would therefore suggest that you always use sterilised, medical-grade Manuka honey formulated for wound care. Remember that a small amount goes a long way in wound dressing, so a small jar will last a long time, unless you regularly encounter Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, or Al Capone.

How do we use Honey for Healing?

As I can attest personally, honey can either be used as an additive contained in off-the-shelf dressings, or, in my case, more effectively by pouring the honey directly onto the open wound in between dressing changes. Notice that I was using honey under medical direction and advice, and only after bleeding had been stopped and an initial nasty infection first brought under control by prescribed oral antibiotics.

Honey was in effect being used to encourage the skin to grow back over the wound, which I distinctly remember was more like a meteoritic or volcanic crater than a hole in the side of my leg. With persistence, however, and careful application of selected honey and sterile dressings, over a period of some five months, the skin re-established itself across my wound, which is now as smooth as a baby’s bottom, although somewhat devoid of feeling and off white in colour, the latter apparently due to a lack of melanin in the new skin, compared to the rest of my leg.

Hence the purpose of Manuka honey, at least in my case, was to increase the speed of healing and to assist in fighting infection. Separate studies reportedly suggest that it can also help treat ulcers and burns.

What do We Look for at the Point of Sale?

If you look for Manuka honey to purchase, you will see it, certainly in Australia, on both the supermarket and the pharmacy shelves. There are reportedly some products that falsely claim to be Manuka honey and this may be worthy of a separate study. I was advised, however, to purchase ‘medical grade’ Manuka honey which, of course, is much more expensive than the common or garden ‘stick-it-in-your-tea’ or ‘eat-it-by-the-spoonful’ yummy honey.

“So what do I look for?” do I hear you asking? Well, you may remember that Manuka honey is so unique because of its non-peroxide activity (NPA) in addition to the beneficial levels of hydrogen peroxide found in most honeys. Laboratory testing is used to determine the level of NPA (also referred as unique Manuka factor, UMF) in the Manuka honey to prove that it is ‘active’ and hence capable of medical benefits for wound treatment, as outlined above.

Another major component unique to Manuka honey is methylglyoxal (MGO), which is also used as an indicator of the strength of NPA in Manuka honey.

Hence, honey on the shelves may have both an NPA rating and an MGO rating, or UMF may be used instead of NPA, or some brands may only display the MGO rating.

By now you’re probably totally confused, so I’ll stick solely to the MGO values, as I’ve found these most predominant in the local brands sold here in Oz. I therefore suggest that you look to the chart below for guidance and use Dr Google to obtain a conversion if the brands available to you do not display an MGO value.

Referenced from Biosata Organics Pty Ltd

In summary then, for wound healing, you should look for medicinal-grade Manuka honeys with an MGO rating of 250+ to 1200+ mg/kg. The higher the MGO the more concentrated the antibacterial and anti-inflammatory activity, which is essential for managing minor cuts to deep ulcers.

Caution

It is important to only use honey for the management of wounds under the instruction and advice of a medical professional and then possibly only in association with other methods and techniques. This post is not intended to provide medical advice, which should be sought from medical professionals (and not from retired engineers such as me). The intent is rather to introduce awareness of the wound healing powers of Manuka honey into the greater community.

Final Words of Wisdom

So there are a few morals to this story as follows:

• Don’t pick a fight with a step ladder!
• Engineers don’t make good self-healers!
• Engineers don’t do skin grafts and doctors don’t build bridges!
• Western medicine is bullshit! No, just joking!
• Always listen to your doctor, particularly if he is not an engineer!

But best of all:

• Honey is a wonderful healer of wounds!!!!!!!

Take a spoonful of honey and call me in the morning! — the author masquerading as a general honey practitioner.

When not researching the weird or the wonderful, the comical or the cultured, the sinful or the serious, I chase my creative side, the results of which can be seen as selected photographs of my travels on my website at:

***http://ken-boddie.squarespace.com***

The author of the above, Ken Boddie, besides being a sometime poet and occasional writer, is an enthusiastic photographer, rarely leisure-traveling without his Canon, and loves to interact with other like-minded people with diverse interests. A retired geotechnical engineer, he honed his knowledge of the English language during decades of labouring over formal reports, with an ever-conscious awareness of the need for clarity and precision in an increasingly litigious world.More recently, he has engaged in various postgraduate English language and grammar studies, leading to his volunteering as an English tutor to adult migrants who have chosen to come to the ‘lucky country’ of Australia.