Not quite sure exactly why but lately I’ve noticed a lot of cultural love coming from France and directed towards Romania.

A case in point is the amazing show on France 2 channel where ER (UK: A&E) doctor Bernard Fontanille travels the world to meet healers who use traditional methods and medicine to treat people. This week he’s in Focsani to meet Dr. Eugen Stefan, Romania’s leading practitioner of using apitherapy (bee products to heal people).

Link goes to the article and video in French but if you read Romanian you can click here to learn more about how Eugen Stefan studied a host of non-traditional medicine skill sets in London and then came home to Romania to be a doctor.

I have to ask, when is the last time that happened? Most Romanian medical students are studying in their country to get a free education with the plan to then go to some other country to make money. This guy did it in reverse, studying in London to return home to Romania.

Très cool !

I don’t know too much about apitherapy but I do know that Romania has some of the healthiest bee populations in the world. Living in Romania, you’d never know that most countries (including the United States) are seeing bees die off by the billions and that finding bees wandering around in nature is actually a RARE thing in many places.

In Romania (and also here in Moldova), I’ve certainly consumed my fair share of honey and related products (like the delicious honeycomb) and the lady down at the piata (market) in Cluj-Napoca was always telling me how her various bee products could be used to cure different ailments and illnesses. I’m a pretty healthy guy so I never tried them. But if they work, awesome!

Note: The title of this post translates to “Romania – the miracle of the bees”