THEY MAKE A BEELINE FOR STING THERAPY.

Byline: Kathleen Green Dallas Morning News

Anne Brown wants bees to sting her for the rest of her life. Painful, yes, but bee venom helps her deal with her multiple sclerosis.

Using ancient acupuncture points, Brown places a honeybee on the tender part of her forearm, watches it burrow into her skin and lets it pump venom into her system for five to 10 minutes.

``I've forgotten and left them (bee stingers) in,'' she says with a laugh. ``During the summer I probably do it a couple of times a week.''

Brown's self-therapy is part of a nationwide movement in which MS patients are turning to alternative medicines, looking for better ways to handle their treatment.

The American Apitherapy Society - a nonprofit group that promotes bee venom therapy - knows of 4,000 Americans who use bee venom to treat diseases, including MS, lupus, arthritis and chronic fatigue. They are networking to find bees, therapy information and even beehives.

``We don't recommend or endorse any of that,'' says Peter Damiri, spokesman for the Multiple Sclerosis Association of America. ``We don't want people to go out and get stung. We don't tell them how to get hives or do treatments.''

The therapy has raised so much interest that the association gave a $250,000 grant to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to begin a yearlong study to determine whether bee venom is safe and nontoxic. The study is scheduled to begin this year once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives approval.

``There was certainly some reservation at first,'' says Damiri, ``but I think that the need to look at this is so great with patients doing this on their own and putting themselves in danger.''

MS experts aren't getting their hopes up, but they will keep a watchful eye on Georgetown's study.

``I don't think the place to gather information is by hearing what people have to say about them, but to test it rigorously,'' says Dr. Elliot Frohman, director of the multiple sclerosis program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He explains that scientific testing eliminates the placebo effect in which test subjects report false favorable results.

``I think you have to recognize that patients with MS are in the prime of life,'' says Frohman. Because the illness limits their quality of life, ``people are willing to go to great extremes to find potential therapies ...''

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic illness that affects the neurological and immune systems, striking most of its victims between ages 20 and 40. About 350,000 Americans suffer from the nonfatal illness that is the most common disabling neurologic disease of young people.

``There's a common theory that it's a virus that was picked up in a childhood illness and then laid dormant for 20 years and then came to attack,'' says Damiri. Insulation around nerves, called myelin, becomes inflamed and deteriorates. Scars form on the nerve, which keep the nerve signal from getting through.

Some of Frohman's patients use bee venom therapy, some with positive results, others with none.

``It's just a brutal approach to treating your disease: bee stings 40 to 50 times a week for the rest of your life,'' says Damiri. ``For people who have no relief otherwise, they do swear by it.''

Brown, who lives in Lubbock, Texas, was reluctant to tell anyone about what might seem like bizarre behavior.

``I never told anybody I was doing it because people thought I was crazy,'' she says. She now realizes that she wasn't alone in using this alternative treatment.

Brown's illness was first diagnosed in 1985, and her health continued to decline until 1989. That's when she heard about bee venom therapy. First she found out whether she had an allergy to bee stings. Then she contacted New England beekeeper Charles Mraz. Over the years, he has been a bee in the medical community's bonnet, first as arthritis patients turned to him for stinging sessions, then as a growing number of others with chronic illnesses sought out alternatives.

``For two years, before I found the bees, I was paralyzed four times. ... I could barely raise my arm, couldn't hold anything, had eye problems, was numb,'' says Brown. Ten years later, she still doesn't walk very well, ``but keep in mind the bees will not, cannot repair damage that has been done.''

When she decided to use bee venom therapy, she gave Mraz a call. Over the phone, he trained her to administer the bees. Brown timidly started stinging herself on her knees and lower legs numerous times three times a week for nearly six months.

``It's like you're on a slide and you're falling down, down, down,'' she says. ``You get worse before you get better. So Charles kept telling me, `Whatever you do, just don't stop.' ''

With her legs very hot and swollen like piano legs, she became frustrated. But she realizes now that the heat was a good sign.

But Brown, who first noticed symptoms when she was a 22-year-old flight attendant for United Airlines, hung in there. In January 1990, she started on an upswing. The paralyzing episodes subsided, and the disease's progression seemed to stop in its tracks.

In the Multiple Sclerosis Association-funded study, 12 to 15 MS patients will receive two bee-venom injections a week for one year and undergo monthly evaluations. Their reactions and progress will be monitored.

``There are sound scientific reasons and theories why bee venom may work because the components affect both the neurological system and immune system,'' Damiri says.

In the meantime, doctors can offer some of their patients relief with two approaches to therapy: one that tries to manage the symptoms and another that's geared toward influencing the course of the illness. Anti-spasmodics and three FDA-approved drugs are available - beta interferons Betacerone, Avonex and Copaxone, which decrease the number of attacks and prevent new lesions in the nervous system - although, says Frohman, ``those drugs don't work for everybody, either. That's why it's important to have choices.''

MS attacks in varying degrees, from ``the totally benign to the totally devastating,'' he says. There are two types: relapsing/remitting, which affects about 85 percent of patients who have some degree of recovery with no progression in between; and primary progressive, which affects 15 percent of MS patients.

``Of those 85 percent, up to 40 percent will convert to a progressive form of the illness,'' says Frohman. Those with the most progressive form of the illness find no relief from conventional treatments. That's why many turn to alternative therapies.

``A big push in the bee sting movement is for progressive patients who have found absolutely no relief with any of the medications that are out there,'' Damiri says, ``and are at a desperate last attempt to do something on their own.''

Bee-venom believer Anne Brown knows all about those drugs and their side effects. She refuses to take them.

``They're not helping us. Personally, I think the drugs in the long run destroy our immune system. You have to take charge of your own health.'' So Brown sticks to the stings.

In one of many efforts for a search for a cure, a recently completed two-year study - reported at the American Neurological Association's annual meeting - showed that Rebif, a beta interferon, successfully reduced the number of relapses, size of areas of the brain under attack and progression of disability for relapsing/remitting patients. Although this latest discovery may seem promising, it's too early to tell.

``Our philosophy is that there can never be enough research and new avenues for patients to get relief,'' Damiri says. ``If this certainly is working for people, we owe it to the patients to carry it further.''

``The bottom line is we don't know if it works,'' says Frohman, who is the holder of the Kenney Marie Dixon/Pickens Distinguished Professorship in MS Research. ``MS is a disease that is clinically highly variable and fluctuating. And the difficulty is always knowing, is that related to the bee venom itself or is that the natural course of the illness?'' Though a lot of discoveries in science are found by serendipity, he's reluctant to pin any hopes on bee-venom therapy.

``There have for many years been false hopes raised by particular therapies that were going to be highly effective for MS, only later to be proven ineffective and very disappointing for patients,'' Frohman says. Promising studies are all too often cut short when either they don't work or are toxic.

``I don't care whether they ever find a cure,'' Brown says. ``I just want to have all the symptoms disappear and just be able to get up every day.''

Web sites

These sites on the World Wide Web offer information about multiple sclerosis, conventional treatments and bee venom therapy:

The Multiple Sclerosis Association of America: www.msaa.com

The American Apitherapy Society: www.beesting.com

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society: www.nmss.org

The Multiple Sclerosis Foundation: www.icanect.net/msf

Computer Literate Advocates for Multiple Sclerosis: www.clams.org

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Photo: Being stung by bees is part of a nationwide movement in which multiple sclerosis patients are turning to alternative medicines, looking for better ways to handle their treatment.

David Sprague/Daily News

Box: Web sites (See Text)