Honey against cancer? Or- why not believe every scientific study

She told me without hesitation that her mother had cancer, that the chemotherapy treatments she was undergoing were causing her great suffering, and that she intended to try to counteract the side effects of the chemotherapy using a special Israeli honey whose medical activity has been proven in scientific research

A few days ago I received a message on Facebook from a friend overseas, with whom I had lost contact several years ago. After exchanging the usual greetings, she told me without hesitation that her mother had cancer, that the chemotherapy treatments she was undergoing were causing her great suffering, and that she intended to try to counter the side effects of the chemotherapy using a special Israeli honey, the medical activity of which has been proven in scientific research. The price of honey is really small, compared to its miraculous effect: 79.95 dollars, for a small jar of honey weighing 120 grams.

At this point my suspicions began to arise. "Can you send me a link to the study?" I asked, and she directed me to the Lifemel Honey website, where a link appeared to a study conducted in 2006 on the special honey. Indeed, in black and white, the data appears about the interesting experiment conducted in Israel and published in one of the most important scientific journals for cancer research - Medical Oncology.
what was there The research team examined thirty cancer patients who underwent chemotherapy, and suffered from a particularly severe side effect of the chemotherapy, which killed a large part of the white blood cells that protect our bodies from invaders. This, of course, is not a desirable phenomenon, and the medical community deals with it by providing expensive drugs that encourage the body to produce more white blood cells. In the current study, the patients initially received the conventional drugs, and then were also injected with Leipmel honey every morning, for five days.

Apparently, the dry data is extremely impressive. In 40% of the patients who received the usual drugs, and then the honey, the number of white blood cells in the body increased, so that they did not have to receive the expensive drugs again. In 64% of the patients there was an improvement in the level of hemoglobin in the blood, which indicates the number of red blood cells and the general health. And last but not least, 32% of the patients reported an improvement in their quality of life in daily activities.

Sound convincing? Definitely yes. But as they say - God is in the details - the real meaning is in the details. And as soon as you start examining the article with critical eyes, you see that there are at least three problems in it - two of them are big and prominent, and one is almost a toddler.

Let's start with the small problem: what does ``improving the quality of life in daily activities'' mean? This is a survey that was passed among the patients in the experiment, and in such a survey it is clear that there will be patients who will report an improvement in their condition: one will recover from a runny nose, another will be able to carry the grocery bag from the car to the house, and a third will discover that he is able to sit ten minutes longer in front of the computer. In every medical trial there are patients whose general condition improves - and hence the described improvement in quality of life does not indicate the success of the honey treatment.

The second and more important problem concerns the number of participants in the experiment. The larger the number of participants in the experiment, the more certain one can be that its results are correct. why is it? Because humans are extremely complicated organisms. Each of the patients in the trial could also recover from the side effects of the chemotherapy on their own. In fact, it is likely that some of them recovered even without the expensive drugs or honey, simply because their bodies were able to cope with the situation. How many were affected by the honey or the medicines, and how many recovered on their own? we can't know. The number of people is simply too small to draw firm conclusions.

The third and main problem is the one that makes the research particularly problematic. We have known for many years that people's health conditions tend to improve when they believe they are receiving particularly effective medication. This phenomenon is called the placebo effect (inbo in standard Hebrew, meaning nothing), and because of this we must have in every medical experiment a group of patients who will not receive the real drug, but a dummy drug - water with sugar, sweet syrup or maybe regular honey instead of honey Leipmel. This group will be called the control group, because its purpose is to check the results of the experiment and make sure that they are not biased due to the placebo effect. If there was a control group in the current experiment, and the condition of the patients in that group would also improve - even though they did not receive the special honey - then we would know that another factor is at work here behind the scenes. Maybe it's the placebo effect that brings improvement. Perhaps the patients are encouraged by the special treatment they receive from the research editor and his charming smile, and the good mental feeling leads to an improvement in their physical condition. Maybe it's a completely different factor that they didn't think about. All these are not hypothetical situations, but possibilities that exist in every experiment. Every scientific experiment conducted today, which wants its results to be taken seriously by the scientific community, is obliged to show the existence of a control group.

Why did they publish such a problematic article in a medical journal? Because in this way many doctors and researchers were exposed to the idea that Leipmel honey can help cancer patients. The same researchers will now try (and perhaps have already tried) to conduct more controlled, larger and smarter experiments. And precisely here comes a particularly painful point, because the original article was already published at the beginning of 2006. More than three years have passed since then, and still no one has reported a successful clinical trial with Leipmel honey. Since in science it is customary to publish only the successful studies, and not the studies that did not produce results, it is likely that more controlled experiments conducted by other researchers on the same honey, simply did not produce the desired results.

"So this research is worth nothing?" my friend asked despondently. And the answer is that in itself, it is indeed worthless. If it was conducted on a hundred patients, half of whom would receive a placebo, and half of whom would receive the full treatment, then there would be something to talk about. And if those fifty who were treated with Leipmel honey showed a significant improvement, compared to the control group, then I would publish a blog post that all cancer patients should buy Leipmel honey tomorrow, if not today. But as of today, the only scientific evidence that supports the effectiveness of Leipmel honey, does not even stand on chicken's knees.

I hope and wish a speedy recovery to my friend's mother, who will probably never read this post.

Link to the Leifmel website