Its a routine practice for one to go to a restaurant and pay to get fish cooked to one’s desire as a meal. But would you pay to have fish eat you?
Images of piranas or sharks devouring a human body make for a good, entertaining horror movie. Scale the fish down to the size of, say 3 centimeters, change the fish type to Garra Rufa, change the location from the Amazon river or the rough seas of South Africa to a controlled fish tank in a spa and you get a million dollar industry. The food chain is getting reversed in the world of beauty treatments!
Beauty is only skin deep but people will go to any length to attain the look, be it with creams and gels or with injections and surgeries. Everyone wants to look beautiful and are willing to try anything to look young and attractive, even if it requires one to dip their feet in a water tank filled with hungry fishes ready to take a chomp off the skin cells! World Spa magazine welcomes you to the world of fish therapy.
The fish therapy is not an unfamiliar idea since the Kangal Spa in Turkey has been functioning since the early 1900’s. The Middle East and parts of Turkey have hot springs where Garra Rufa fish have been alleviating and sanitizing the skin of the bathers for many years. An accidental discovery, people in the baths noticed that these tiny fish were biting off dead skin cells while leaving the healthy skin as it was.
These tiny, unpaid, primitive therapists would use their saliva to soften the skin and begin nibbling the callus covered skin. Sometimes referred to as ‘Doctor Fish’, the fishes exudes an enzyme called diathanol that fastens the regeneration of skin. These fishes are renowned for their ability to find and feed on dead or damaged areas of the skin surface while the skin gets exfoliated. The fish nibble away the dead membrane cuticles and coat the skin surface with saliva encouraging the speedy recovery of the lesions. Fish therapy is effortless on the part of the paying patron and does not cause irritation or scarring of the skin. The down side is that one suffers from bouts of giggles as the fish bites feel ticklish on the skin.
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