Conclusions
The clinical evidence for the use of honey in wound management
is steadily accumulating and, with the advent of various forms of
manufactured honey dressings currently commercially available or
being developed for marketing, the flow of evidence will continue.
Whilst the evidence pre-2000 was on generic honeys, more recent
research has been focused on the sterile medical grade honey products
intended specifically for wound management. These products have
been designed to overcome many of the problems of messiness and
difficulty of handling, making honey-based products as convenient to
use as the more familiar modern wound dressings. Some involve the
combination of honey with a modern dressing such as alginate or sheet
hydrogel. Others present honey as a tubed formulation of amorphous
gel or of ointment. This brings the most ancient form of wound dressing
known into the realms of the most modern — an easy-to-use, bioactive
dressing that provides a moist healing environment, with the advantage
of having within a single product a range of actions (debriding,
deodorising, antibacterial, growth-promoting, anti-inflammatory, and
scar-minimising), usually available only individually in a range of products. These attributes will, no doubt, be shown to be cost-effective
in future clinical research.
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