For the past four months, every two weeks, I have been wandering over to my refrigerator, fetching out for myself a shotglass-sized vial of pig whipworms from Thailand, and swallowing the entire vial. But I don’t stop there. Two weeks later, I drip a tiny pipette down my throat of rat tapeworms, harvested by a laboratory in the UK.
Why the hell would I be inoculating myself with what are widely considered to be vicious little parasites? It all started when I was visiting with a fellow health enthusiast, who informed me that he had been exploring the world of something called “helminthic therapy”, that both he and his brother had been swallowing these kind of worms every 10-14 days, that his usually problematic gut had “never felt better” and that he planned on continuing to eat tapeworms and whipworms for the rest of his life. I was intrigued.
And thus I proceeded to take a deep dive into the wonderful world of helminthic therapy.