Author: Katie Edwards, Commissioning Editor, Health + Medicine and Host of Strange Health podcast, The Conversation

Halfpoint/Shutterstock Period scooping sounds like something you would only hear in a biology lab, not while doom-scrolling TikTok. Yet earlier this year, videos claiming you can “scoop out” your period to avoid the mess and shorten the whole thing racked up millions of views. Some people were pushing in the shower using pelvic floor muscles. […]

Sergiy Katyshkin/Shutterstock Light therapy sounds wholesome. Clean. Almost pastoral. Sit in front of a lamp. Feel better. In our latest episode of the Strange Health podcast, we discovered that it can also mean strapping on a flashing mask and watching your own brain generate kaleidoscopic hallucinations behind closed eyelids. The spark for this episode was […]

New Africa/Shutterstock Body odour has a reputation problem. It is often treated as a hygiene failure or a social offence. In reality, it is biology at work, plus a big helping of culture. Most body odour is not produced by sweat itself. Sweat is largely odourless. Smell develops when bacteria (and sometimes fungi) on the […]

Close-up of a demodex folliculorum mite: your skin is alive with company Kalcutta/Shutterstock You are not alone in your own skin. Millions of microscopic creatures live there too. Our skin is home to entire ecosystems of microscopic life. Bacteria and fungi get most of the attention, but mites are there too. Among the most common […]

Girts Ragelis/Shutterstock The vagus nerve has become the internet’s favourite body part. On social media, it is everywhere. People hum into their phones, gargle with theatrical enthusiasm, dunk their faces into bowls of ice water and poke at their ears in the hope of “activating” it. Influencers describe it as a hidden master switch for […]

Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock Joint cracking is one of those habits most of us acquire without thinking about it. A knuckle popped mid-sentence. A back twisted as we stand up. A neck gently crunched while the kettle boils. It is common, oddly satisfying and, for anyone sitting nearby, faintly alarming. It is also surprisingly divisive. Some people wince […]

January arrives with a familiar hangover. Too much food. Too much drink. Too much screen time. And suddenly social media is full of green juices, charcoal supplements, foot patches and seven-day “liver resets”, all promising to purge the body of mysterious toxins and return it to a purer state. In the first episode of Strange […]

Video_Stock _Production/Shutterstock The human body, it turns out, is surprisingly good at making stone. Give it enough time and the right conditions and it will go about crystallising minerals, hardening secretions and, in rare cases, turning tragedy into rock. Gallstones. Kidney stones. Tonsil stones. Salivary stones. And, in one of the strangest and saddest corners […]