Dark Age detoxes sometimes resembled TikTok health trends
There are countless so-called wellness tips permeating platforms like TikTok on any given day. And while many are little better than pseudoscience, some treatments like acupuncture are based on legitimate medicinal practices dating back millennia. This mix of both good and bad health remedies is nothing new, but according to researchers compiling a growing database of centuries’ old medical manuscripts, some of today’s social media suggestions aren’t that far off from prescriptions documented in the Dark Ages. But whether that’s a positive or a negative sort of depends on how you view things. “People were engaging with medicine on a much broader scale than had previously been thought,” Meg Leja, a Binghamton University medieval historian, said in a recent profile. “They were concerned about cures, they wanted to observe the natural world and jot down bits of information wherever they could in this period known as the ‘Dark Ages.’” Leja is also...