by Meghan McGowan
Read Time: 4 mins
Wound care is constantly evolving, and medical-grade honey is on the cutting edge. Despite honey’s unassuming role in the average pantry, honey-based wound care can support healing in challenging wounds.
Shauna Winston, RRT, RCP, Category Manager at Dynarex, recently spoke about medical-grade honey in advanced wound care.
Q: What is medical-grade honey? How does it differ from food-grade honey?
A: Medical-grade honey is a sterile form of honey used in wound care to support a clean, balanced healing environment—it’s not kitchen honey. Facilities can’t use regular food-grade honey on wounds because it isn’t sterile, and can carry spores and contaminants. It also doesn’t have the same healing properties as medical-grade honey. Clinical reliability comes from sterility and standardization.
Q: How does medical grade honey work in a wound?
A: Medical-grade honey helps wounds heal through four main mechanisms.
- Osmosis: Honey’s high sugar content helps draw water out of bacteria so that they can’t multiply. It also draws fluid from deeper wound tissues to help lift debris and dead tissue.
- Enzymatic Hydrogen Peroxide Release: When honey mixes with wound fluid, an enzyme called glucose oxidase produces low-level hydrogen peroxide, which further controls bacteria.
- Moisture Retention: Honey is a humectant–it holds on to moisture, keeping tissues soft and supporting cell migration, collagen formation, and autolytic debridement.
- Lowering pH: Most chronic wounds develop a higher pH, which encourages bacterial growth and slows healing. With a pH of about 3.2-4.5, honey makes a wound more acidic and less bacteria-friendly, increasing oxygen release from hemoglobin and supporting tissue-repair enzymes.
In short, medical-grade honey cleans, protects, and conditions the wound all at once. It doesn’t use harsh antiseptics and doesn’t contribute to antibiotic resistance.
Q: We hear a lot about antimicrobial resistance. What is that, and why does it matter in wound care?
A: Antimicrobial resistance occurs when germs mutate into new strains that do not respond to medicines that had once been effective. This can make infections harder to treat, keeping patients sicker for longer. In the U.S., there are millions of these infections every year.
Q: Is all medical grade honey the same?
A: There are various types of medical-grade honey — potency, purity, and formulation can vary by brand. Dynarex L-Mesitran, for instance, uses high-activity medical-grade honey combined with a gentle, stable base, giving clinicians consistent antimicrobial performance with better patient comfort.
Q: What exactly is L Mesitran?
A: L-Mesitran is a sterile honey-based formula with 40% medical-grade honey, hypo-allergenic lanolin, and vitamins C and E to promote healing. It’s commonly used with secondary dressings to minimize adherence to the wound bed.
Q: What types of wounds respond best to honey based products like L Mesitran?
A: Injuries such as venous leg ulcers, pressure injuries, diabetic foot ulcers (within comprehensive care), superficial surgical wounds, donor and recipient sites, partial thickness burns, and malodorous or colonized wounds all tend to respond well to honey-based products.
Certain wound types are not ideal for honey. Dry, heavily scabbed wounds without proper blood flow, or very heavily exuding wounds (unless paired with strong absorption) are less suitable. Patients with a bee or bee product allergy should also avoid honey.
Q: Can you describe a real world scenario where L Mesitran would make clinical sense?
A: Imagine a diabetic foot ulcer that has been treated with silver or iodine for weeks; the infection is gone, but the wound is stalled and won’t close. The clinician switches to L-Mesitran because the silver has become too harsh for the fragile new skin cells. The product’s osmotic effect cleans the wound while its vitamins jumpstart healing, closing the wound without risking tissue toxicity.
Q: Where do you see honey based wound care in the future?
A: Honey-based products are moving from alternative options to a frontline defense. As bacteria become increasingly resistant to antibiotics and even silver, medical-grade honey remains effective because its physical method of killing germs is nearly impossible for bacteria to build a resistance against.
The industry is shifting from passive dressings that just cover a wound towards bio-active therapies. Honey doesn’t just protect: it actively debrides the tissue, neutralizes odor, and seeds the wound bed with nutrients.
The Last Word
Honey is no longer a last resort. It is becoming the bridge that allows clinicians to treat infections and promote healing simultaneously, reducing the need for more aggressive interventions.
Explore Dynarex wound care products today!