Stinging Endorsement : Multiple Sclerosis Sufferers Swear by Bee Venom

The stinging hour has begun at Shirley Checkos’ house, and the half-dozen people in her living room wait eagerly as she reaches into an old mayonnaise jar for more bees. Grabbing the insects with tweezers, she presses them, one by one, to bare shoulders, backs and knees.

“Ow! You really got me!” yelps a woman who has arrived with the help of a walker. But a man in a wheelchair serenely asserts that he can’t feel the stingers plunging into his knees.

The people in Checkos’ Granada Hills home have multiple sclerosis, an incurable and often disabling nerve disease. Although medical experts discount the effectiveness of bee venom, these MS sufferers believe it can help them. And anyway, the woman they call “Sure Sting Shirley” doesn’t charge for her services.

Checkos, 48, has been stinging MS patients since her husband, Larry, a waterproofing contractor with MS, got the stinging treatment from a Maryland woman in September and felt better immediately. Since then, the Checkoses have turned their Tudor-style home into a sort of mini-Lourdes, attracting a small but growing coterie of MS victims.

Shirley Checkos treats about 10 MS sufferers, giving them as many as 25 stings at a time, three times a week. She has given her husband nearly 500 altogether. After one recent session, his lower back was a mass of red welts.

Medical authorities will not say categorically that bee venom does not help some MS patients. But they say there is no scientific evidence to support the notion that bee stings can relieve the disease.

Moreover, MS is known for the mysterious waning and waxing of its symptoms. And natural slowdowns in the disease’s progression often are mistakenly attributed, without scientific proof, to questionable treatments such as bee stings, said Stephen Reingold, vice president of research and medical programs at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in New York.

Reingold also warned of anaphylactic shock, an allergic reaction to bee venom that he said kills 10,000 Americans per year.

An estimated 330,000 Americans have MS. Its precise cause is unknown, but it is thought to be an immune-system malfunction that prompts the body to mistakenly attack myelin sheaths that protect nerve fibers in the brain, spine and eyes. Scarring of the myelin interferes with the transmission of nerve impulses between the brain and muscles.

MS symptoms include difficulty in walking, blurred vision, excessive fatigue, bladder and bowel incontinence, numbness, loss of balance, tremors, slurred speech and, in severe cases, partial or total paralysis, which in rare cases leads to death.

Often promoted by commercial beekeepers, bee venom is an old folk treatment that has been used for decades by lay practitioners against MS, arthritis and other illnesses. But it has never been tested on humans in a controlled, scientific fashion, according to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and thus remains in the realm of unproven treatments.

Interest in bee-sting therapy, also known as apitherapy, was renewed this year by a wave of media reports about two bee-sting practitioners: Pat Wagner, a Maryland woman whose home attracts droves of the sick; and Charles Mraz, an 88-year-old, Middlebury, Vt., beekeeper widely viewed as an apitherapy guru.

In an interview, Mraz said he has treated people with MS for eight years, and claims that the stings have eliminated symptoms in at least two people. He said he began believing in bee venom after stings cured him of rheumatic fever at age 28.

“If I can’t tell the difference between therapeutic effect and . . . spontaneous remission, I should get the hell out of this,” he said. “People that have MS, they know the difference.”

Larry Checkos couldn’t agree more.

Diagnosed with MS at age 28, he developed most of the classic symptoms. For one terrifying day, he was completely paralyzed. His legs were so weak his son had to carry him up the stairs to bed. He had trouble controlling his bladder. By last summer, he was in a wheelchair, an agonizing disability for a once-vigorous man who had enjoyed skiing, bowling, hiking and bicycling.

But after receiving nine stings from Pat Wagner in September, Larry Checkos, now 44, said he felt his condition improve immediately.

He is by no means cured, he said. But he can drive a car again and walk, albeit shakily. His bladder problems have disappeared.

“I’ve never felt this much energy from a little bitty bee before in my life,” he said. “It’s amazing. It’s wonderful.”

Checkos’ neurologist, Dr. Ronald Lawrence, a professor at UCLA School of Medicine, confirmed that Checkos has MS and was recently in a wheelchair.

Since Checkos was stung, his leg muscles are slightly stronger and his vision has improved somewhat, Lawrence said.

But, the physician added: “I didn’t notice any remarkable change. He still has MS, and he’s still going to have remissions and exacerbations.” There is no way to tell if Checkos’ mild improvements were the result of bee venom or natural fluctuations in the disease, he said.

Nonetheless, Lawrence said he wasn’t opposed to bee sting therapy. “If the patient is helped and not harmed, and it doesn’t cost a lot of money . . . what the heck?” he said.

Shirley Checkos said MS sufferers “are so tired of spending umpteen dollars and seeing umpteen doctors and not getting any help, they get discouraged. And so they turn to non-traditional treatments.”

“This is not outlandish. If nothing else, it’s painless (for some) and it’s not harmful,” said Walter Uhrman, a wheelchair-bound Northridge attorney who has had MS for 19 years and received his first stings from Shirley on a recent weekday.

Shirley gets her bees from a Van Nuys beekeeper whom she refuses to name. She said she is fully aware of the risks of anaphylactic shock, and insists that people who visit her be screened for allergic reaction by their doctors beforehand and bring along an antidote kit when they go to her house.

A spokeswoman for the Medical Board of California said Shirley’s activities “could be construed” as illegally practicing medicine without a license. But the spokeswoman conceded that state authorities are unlikely to seek prosecution of Checkos, since she operates on such a small scale and has not been the target of consumer complaints.

MS experts acknowledge that bee venom contains at least three compounds that may enhance conductivity through damaged nerves.

But they also say that MS patients often respond strongly to the disease’s well-known “placebo effect.” Experts noted that the mere hope of getting better from a given treatment can produce striking improvements in MS sufferers, even if the remedy has no therapeutic value, such as placebos in drug trials.

Bee venom is hardly the first unproven remedy to be zealously embraced by MS patients desperate enough to try almost anything that promises relief.

At one time or another, more than 130 forms of treatment--including scorpion venom, electrical stimulation of the spine and cleansing of the blood--have been touted as effective until later studies pointed up their shortcomings.

Officials at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society are dismayed that they have received so many inquiries about bee venom at a time when they are trying to get word out about a newly approved MS drug, Betaseron. The compound has been proven in clinical tests to reduce the frequency and severity of symptoms in the relatively mild “relapsing-remitting” form of MS. About 25% of MS sufferers have that type.

A spokesman for the drug’s maker, Berlex Laboratories, of Richmond, Calif., said about 70,000 people have signed up for the compound, which will cost about $10,000 annually per individual. But due to insufficient production capacity, those toward the end of the waiting list will not be able to get the drug until late 1994 or early 1995.

Such delays, and the drug’s relatively narrow application, have angered many MS families, including Shirley and Larry Checkos.

“There’s got to be a ray of hope for these people,” said Shirley. “And everyone I’ve been helping with bee stings is getting better. I just feel there’s got to be something for these people to look forward to.”