Honey for acne scars

by Rosy

Active Manuka Honey is a natural scar treatment that promotes fast scar healing and scar reduction.

It is a medicinal honey that is collected from the flower of the tea tree bush in New Zealand.

How Active Manuka Honey can help reduce ugly scars?

Unlike other wound dressings Active Manuka Honey nurtures the wound in the moist environment it creates and thereby helps the tissue to grow back.

Active Manuka Honey provides the wound with amino acids, vitamins and sugars. The vitamin C in it for example might play a major role in collagen synthesis for scar reduction.

Active Manuka Honey creates a protective barrier over the new growing tissue. With the honey on the wound no scar causing scab can form.

Therefore Active Manuka Honey might help healing a scar faster than conventional treatments do.

Can Active Manuka Honey also be used as acne scar treatment?

Active Manuka Honey can also be applied as acne scar treatment. The thought of honey in your face might be strange at the beginning, but this acne scar treatment can pay off.

Take a little Active Manuka Honey and place it on the acne scar. Apply the Active Manuka Honey twice daily. The honey helps drawing out moisture from the acne scar and helps healing it. Within 3-4 days the skin should look significantly better.

How do you apply Active Manuka Honey as scar treatment?

Depending on the size of the wound, apply 1-2 teaspoons of Active Manuka Honey to a sterile gauze and place it as first layer on the wound. Usually it is enough if you hold this first gauze with a skin tape in order to avoid leaking. If you wish you can also place a second sterile and dry gauze on the wound before fixing the wound with rolled gauze wrap to keep the layers in place.

Before applying and when changing the wound dressing wash the affected area gently with warm water in order to prevent infections. You should change the honey wound dressing every 12 hours.

The length of the treatment depends on the size and depth of your wound, however it usually does not exceed more than three weeks. The treatment can be ended once the skin of the affected area is dry (not crusty) and the pain decreases.

Since ancient times honey has been used as a natural medicine in many cultures. Its antibacterial properties however have only been discovered a century ago.

Active Manuka Honey has been researched by Dr. Peter Molan, Senior Lecturer at the Waikato University in New Zealand for over 20 years.

The UMF Activity in Manuka Honey has been described by Molan and Russell (1998) and Allen (1991). The substance has so far not been identified. Westen (1999) found that the activity was not caused by the phenolics (including flavonoids) found in Manuka Honey.

Honey has been shown in laboratory studies to have antibacterial activity against the 7 most common species of bacteria found in wounds. Minimum dilutions varied depending on the species of bacteria and the type of activity, but complete inhibition was shown for all species at below 10% honey concentration. Manuka Honey that showed UMF activity was effective in killing Staphylococcus aureus, the most common wound-infection species, at 1,8% honey concentration (Willix 1992). Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains have also been tested against both types of activity, with complete inhibition shown at 10% honey concentration (Molan 1996).
Honey in fact inhibits a broad spectrum of bacteria. Some reports even show an anti-fungal activity. Some honeys will work better than others though. The Honey Research Unit at the Waikato University in New Zealand is constantly investigating honey as a therapeutic agent.

Research has shown that when comparing two groups of burn victims where one group was treated with Active Manuka Honey, also called Active Manuka Honey, and the other group with regular wound treatment for burns, that the patients treated with Manuka Honey could be released 1 week earlier from the hospital and not one patient of the honey treated group needed skin grafting.