Spa Strangeness

I just read an article on Travel and Leisure called The World's Strangest Spa Treatments. It made me think of Hawk's Cay Resort, a place my agency marketed for nine years.  When they added their spa, my biz partner Kimberly and I were very grateful that they did not offer a Mud Body Treatment. Our feelings about it - it's dirt. It's clean dirt we've been told. Is that an oxymoron? Moreover, if you get into the mud in order to have the dirt and toxins mysteriously pulled out of your pores, then does the clean mud become dirty? And how many people detox in the clean mud before they change the dirty dirt to clean dirt? These are things I need to know before I submerge my body into a communal mud bath.

This article makes the dirty mud issue seem like kindergarten as far as strange goes. The winner in my opinion, the "Full-Body Fish Nibbling" in Malasia, where garra rufa (in the carp family) eat away at your dead skin. Gross! Number two on my list has to be the "Harmony Balls Massage" in Los Cabos, Mexico. I'm sorry, but those two balls remind me of something way too personal to be rolled on my back by a stranger. Among my other picks, the Light Capsule - resembling a closed MRI, the Ice Room - a fridge basically, and finally the Sake Bath - do they serve that at the restaurant afterwards?

I searched the internet for other strange spa treatments and found everything from Butt Facials to Bird Dropping Facials to Snake Massages. Why can't we just be happy with a good old fashioned Back Rub?