Modern society may no longer be using cocaine for toothaches or chloroform for asthma, but we’re not without our fair share of health practices that sound bizarre to the uninitiated. Exhibit A? Grounding — the act of walking barefoot or otherwise touching your bare skin to the Earth (literally, touching grass) — as a way of achieving supposed health benefits.

Those who live online won’t be surprised to see yet another bizarre-sounding health trend emerge. Spend a little time on Health Twitter or really any other community on social media, and you’ll soon find people sleeping with their mouths taped shut, removing all the plasma from their bodies, sunning their buttholes, calling diet advice “oppression,” doing coffee enemas, accusing anyone not wearing a mask years after the peak of COVID-19 as being an ‘air rawdogger’ with a vendetta against their elderly neighbors (sorry Taylor) — all supposedly in the name of “health.”

But another such practice that’s gaining popularity in online circles is indeed touching grass and walking barefoot, not as a way of signaling to university coeds you’re a “free spirit” who will sell them mushrooms, but as a genuine health protocol to be incorporated into one’s daily routine. And though it’s grown to become the subject of memes, make no mistake — grounders are serious about the practice, and it’s gaining popularity in “Lindy” corners of Health

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