A Crosstalk Between Antiinflammatory and Wound-Healing Properties of Honey

The human race has been using honey for more than 4000 years. It has been described to have medicinal properties in Islamic, Hindu, and other literatures. The Islamic holy writing, Quran, mentions it as an agent to cure human illness (Khan et al. 2014). Wound healing is a multistep process orchestrated by the recruitment of many cells, cytokines, growth factors and other downstream signaling molecules. Wound management is a matter of high concern in today’s modern medicine era. Proper wound healing has a predominant effect on the quality of life. Large resources are utilized around the world for wound management, and, thus, it is a challenge for health care professionals. Skin medicine is a growing field of research and researchers all over the globe do find a great interest in naturopathy. Among various natural medicinal ways to treat wounds, apitherapy, using honey, is of real use. Apitherapy is a type of alternative therapy to treat wounds, infections, and other diseases using bee-derived products (Sun et al. 2019). Honey has been used for the treatment of wound and many other ailments since antiquity. Honey-driven wound repair has been studied in a number of experiments. Different types of honey have different pharmacological properties. As far as meta-analysis regarding this chapter that was done, we considered Manuka honey that has been extensively studied and has been found to be highly efficient in wound healing and skin regeneration. Various studies have explained the crosslink between the antiinflammatory, antioxidative, and wound healing actions of honey. Reepithelialization, fibrous tissue generation, neovascularization, release of certain growth factors, and antiinflammatory and anti-infective responses might be responsible in eliciting the wound-healing effects of honey. This might be attributed to a wide range of bioactive compounds present in honey making it suitable candidate for clinicians and researchers to use it as a healing agent. Honey has been used to make different hydrogels with agents like chitosan, pectin, etc., as dressing pads for treating a wide variety of wounds. So far many experimental trials conducted point to honey as a potential agent for wound healing, but further high-end research is required to exactly determine the mechanism of action at the genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic levels. This chapter gives a vivid insight into the applicability of honey in dermal medicine for wound healing, skin renewal, and regeneration.