Crazy celebrity wellness fad or underdiagnosed public health menace? I wasn’t sure one way or the other how I felt about the invasion of parasites that are supposedly living inside us. Like me, you’ve probably read about human parasites, the rogues gallery of worms and protozoas that are in the news. The list of non-medically-verified parasite infestations is pretty glam:

Icky and interesting, for sure, but what's really going on here? I spoke to health practitioners including a medical doctor to find out.

Dr. Supriya Rao (she/her) is a quadruple board-certified physician in internal medicine, gastroenterology, obesity medicine and lifestyle medicine who focuses on digestive disorders, gut health, obesity medicine and women's health and wellness. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University School of Medicine, she joined Integrated Gastroenterology Consultants in Massachusetts in 2014 and is now a managing partner. She is a spokesperson for the  American Gastroenterological Association.

A note of clarification—I didn’t think too much about all these creepy crawlies until a close friend with compromised immunity reported feeling “less than.” She experienced physical conditions like overall itchiness (especially at night), bloating, brain fog and unexplained exhaustion, no matter how much sleep she got. “Also, I felt like I wasn't in charge of what I was eating. I was having incredible cravings for sugar and salt,” she said. After her medical doctor ran tests including a fecal sample that didn’t show irregularities, she reported her symptoms to her functional medicine doctor. That practitioner told her that, even though parasites weren’t detected in tests, they could be present in her body. That’s when she undertook an 11-month-long series of herbal tinctures and pill supplements made by Idaho-based company Cellcore Biosciences in an effort to kill parasites and flush her body of toxins.

For many integrative medicine devotees, however, a medical doctor’s or clinical researcher’s word isn’t necessarily the last one. “Alternative medicine is a completely different camp than conventional doctors,” maintains Robin Colvey, a foundational nutritionist and detox specialist based in Solana Beach, California. Her take? Conventional Western medicine is lagging in effective treatment for some of modern man's ills, while alternative medicine is breaking new ground. “I watched it happen with my sister, who had Lyme disease years ago, it takes 20 to 30 years for the normal Western traditionally trained doctors and specialists to catch up with what really is working.”

So, are parasites an under-treated epidemic or an over-hyped public health scare? I reckon the truth is somewhere in between. I’m glad my friend is feeling better, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have the stomach for doing a months-long parasite cleanse myself. However, I do know that it won’t be too soon before I can cleanse my social media feed of #wormtok content, which is upsetting my digestion without getting near a single pest.

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