My Friend Did a Parasite Cleanse, But a Gastroenterologist Has Concerns

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:

• years ago, Gwyneth Paltrow undertook a goats-milk cleanse to rid herself of parasites
• more recently, Heidi Klum said she was on a parasite cleanse
• Brandi Glanville posts TikToks showing what she says is a parasite that moves around her face
• Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times that even though a parasite ate part of his brain, he’s suffered no long-lasting effects

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.

During her detox, E. reported that she’d feel so nauseated, crampy or tired that she didn’t want to continue, in which case her functional medicine doctor, who was closely monitoring her, would suggest easing off the regimen for a few days or a week. What did the treatment look and feel like? “In the beginning, you start to see, like, tiny liver flukes in the toilet,” she said, “and then after six or seven months I thought I must be done when I passed a worm so long it hit the back of my leg,” she remembers with a shudder. Today, five months post-treatment, “I don't have the exhaustion like I did. I don't have the puffiness like I did. I definitely have more energy. My joints don't ache like they did and my body isn't that itchy. The other thing is, when the parasites were in full swing, I would like, wake up like clockwork at three o'clock, really hungry, and often be up from three to five, which is the time of the liver in Chinese medicine. So my body was, like, working so hard to detox.”

Why does she think this happened to her? Where did the parasites come from? Perhaps from a recent extended stay she had on a working farm, “or it could be the dog that I rescued from South Korea that was full of worms, heartworm and other things when I got him. It could be that I had a kid in preschool and kindergarten, the kids that play in playgrounds—if there's any playground with sand, those are riddled with pin worms….Or maybe it could have been sushi,” she says.

Is E’s ailment one in a million? Is it quite common? Or is it all—to bring in the working farm—horse sh*t? It depends who you ask. Arizona-based integrative oncologist Dr. Thomas Lodi says there’s a rash of parasitic infections across the population, and recommends protracted combinations of prescription anti-parasitic medicines to treat them. A host of other physicians and wellness content creators on TikTok do, too. But gastroenterologist Dr. Supriya Rao is skeptical.

“If you have known exposure, like, let's say you traveled out of the country and then you had significant diarrhea, and coming back you're still having issues, you should see your physician for testing. We can test for these things in the stool, either worms or other kinds of organisms, and then give proper anti-parasitic medication to treat it and make sure it's dead,” Dr. Rao says. “Occasionally, if we need to, we would do an endoscopy or a colonoscopy to look inside, to see anything as well. And then there are some blood tests that we can do, and anti-parasitic medications that we would prescribe for treatment. But the teas, the detox, all that stuff is a complete money grab,” she says.

Dr. Rao doesn’t name any supplements in particular, but recommends steering clear in general. “Oftentimes, these medications end up causing liver failure or kidney failure or other things that can actually make you really sick. They're not regulated. You don't know what's in them. And people end up getting actually much sicker. We've seen people who drink teas end up coming in, like, bright yellow because they're jaundiced.” A thoughtful pause: “It just makes me nervous for them,” she says.

Complicating the matter further, there’s a scientific school of thought that says some parasites are healthy and have evolved with humans, including, some theories say, to help with inflammatory responses. “There is now substantial human epidemiological data and several animal studies supporting the hypothesis that helminths protect the host from immunological disease,” claims a 2004 article in the scientific journal Gut. A helminth, dear reader, is just another term for a parasitic worm.

Complicating the matter further, there’s the idea that some parasites are healthy and have evolved with humans, including, some theories say, to help with inflammatory responses.

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.