What is period scooping? And other menstrual hacks you should think twice about

0:00When it is that time of the month, I get into the shower and I scoop as much out as I can as possible because I don't want to deal with it.

0:09Sally King:You have to be really careful with the sort of pH and what you're putting up inside the body. My auntie Annie, she used to say, so you couldn't ever, it wasn't a word. The stem cells that we have in menstrual fluid are unique and they're amazing.

0:29Hello and welcome to Strange Health from the Conversation, the show where we explore all the weird and wonderful stuff that your body gets up to. I'm Katie Edwards, I'm health and medicine editor at The Conversation in the UK and we're an independent source of news and analysis powered by academics and journalists working together to make evidence accessible. I'm Dan Bangor and I'm a GP and lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol. Well, have we got an episode for you? So I've been inspired by the viral hack, the period hack that's gone online just a couple of weeks ago about period scooping.

1:09Now if... Period scooping? Yeah, you heard. So let's watch a video and find out what it is. when it is that time of the month i get into the shower and i scoop as much out as i can as possible because i don't want to deal with it and to me it's just easier to reach up in there and scoop out as much as i can and i do it every morning during that time of the month and then i barely have any sort of residual action throughout the day dan have you ever heard of the scoop never before first time sounds a bit uncomfortable but anyway if it works for her but I I that's a new one no and to each their own and it's very much a new one for me and I've never heard anybody in a clinical setting mention it either you can be the one Dan now I can right we've also got in addition so a very different approach to period blood oh so not scooping no we're not on his face well we aren't me and you i'm not gonna ask like we're not gonna do it right now um but apparently it's got stem cells in it period blood and that it's got really good stuff in it okay so to try and you know take advantage of all that put it on the face for really good skin right all right girls so it's that time of the month where i've saved up all of my period and i'm putting it on my face as a face mask because you guys know how detoxifying all of that is did you see a little bit of period on your face yeah i saved up all my period for my detoxifying mask and that's what you're filming right now yeah it's like a little period get ready with me no it's not yes it is that's your period yeah most girls do it in private but i thought i'd just talk about it you're not messing with you right now no but how long have you been doing that for then so there we've got um a couple who were just getting ready in the bathroom and the woman was doing a period get ready with me which you know I'm sure we've all been there she'd apparently saved it all up in a Tupperware and then she was applying it to her face and her boyfriend didn't seem to it was news to him and she tried to put a bit on his face and he let her put a bit on his face and then he gagged but there's loads in there isn't there because there's the kind of taboo thing about period blood, about, you know, that it's dirty, that you don't want it getting on your body.

3:44You know, it's a bit like the idea that it's, you know, it's abject. So it's like disgusting stuff. It's gross. And then also there's the idea that it's a waste product from the body, that it's like poo. What did you think, Dan? Well, I think the look on his face said everything. I think that's probably the reaction that I sort of had. Absolutely no idea that that was coming up. But when you think about it, you know, it is a natural product of our body's function. It's there for a reason. It's there to clear out the inside of the uterus and it's regulated by hormones and the menstrual cycle. So it is a natural byproduct of life and of, you know, daily routine.

4:23So what I'm sort of struggling to get to grips with is the sort of like the confirmation of how much evidence there is behind it being good on your face. As far as I'm concerned, you know, if people want to put, you know, period blood all over the face, it's like fill your boobs. But apparently dermatologists say it's not a great idea because you can get allergies. There's bacteria, obviously. And if you're saving period blood up, there's a chance that actually you're going to start introducing stuff that wasn't there in the first place. So, I mean, to be honest, if I thought it were going to be good, I would have a go at it.

4:59Yeah, I think that most people are going to be passing on that. Okay, so I wanted to find out more about what's going on with these period hacks. Like, can you actually shorten your period? What kind of, you know, benefits does menstrual blood have? So I've been speaking to an expert in menstruation for our Ask the Expert section.

5:20Hi, Sally King. So you're a medical physiologist and visiting fellow at King's College in London. You're an expert in menstruation. so Sally period scooping so this is a massive trend on TikTok right now it's going viral

5:37Sally King:can you tell me what is going on there I think a lot of TikTok depends on things being taboo or slightly kind of exciting topics and because periods are sadly taboo topic even though they're perfectly healthy and normal it can attract attention when I was looking at the TikTok videos, there are actually three different things that I saw being talked about under this heading of period scooping. So one of them is simply using your pelvic floor muscles. So those are the muscles inside your body, down at the bottom, that you can sort of clench and release. And the idea is that you can somehow control the volume of blood and when it comes out.

6:19For example, people saying either when they're in the shower or on their loo, they'll sort of push using those core muscles to get rid of as much menstrual fluid as possible. And they're kind of implying that this shortens your period in some way. But that's not technically true. You can't shorten your period. The period is the lining of the womb coming away along with some blood and other liquid. You can't affect that by what you're doing down below in your vaginal canal. But it's sort of about getting rid of as much menstrual fluid as you can, perhaps before going to work or going swimming, something like that.

6:58So it's kind of true that you can do that. That's absolutely fine. It's not dangerous. To be honest, there's nothing new about that. People have sort of found that by themselves for many years and haven't sort of branded it scooping. But there was another sort of couple of things which are a bit more sort of challenging and some of them even sort of harmful. one of them was talking about scooping as if you would use water, so maybe using a showerhead or water when you're bathing, to wash up inside the vagina to sort of clean out menstrual fluid from within the vagina. This again isn't new, it's actually a practice called douching, it's relatively popular in France and in the US for example, but not so much here in the UK.

7:41it's really not very good for you. So it's bad for your reproductive health. People have even found problems with maintaining pregnancies, lots of infections, so bacterial vaginosis or thrush, but even serious infections that go on to become pelvic inflammatory disease can be caused by using water and particularly soap or detergents inside the vagina. And that's kind of well established in science that you should never clean or wash out the inside your body in the vagina. Is that because you're introducing bacteria? It relates to bacteria but it's not that you're introducing things. The vagina is a self-cleaning part of the body and it has an acidic pH whereas water is neutral.

8:29When you're putting water inside you're changing the pH of that environment which changes which bacteria live there. So you're sort of harming the good bacteria that your body is naturally producing and tend to live in the vagina most of the cycle and while you're of reproductive age. By changing the pH, you're increasing the higher levels of more harmful bacteria or bacteria associated with infections. And then soap is alkali. If you're not rinsing out properly, it would be quite harmful to leave bits of soap, for example, inside the vagina. and this goes for things like people use Dettol, quite strong detergents.

9:06All of these things come from a sort of place of shame, I think. The idea that that part of the body is dirty, which is kind of the opposite. It's intrinsically self-cleaning. There's so much social stigma around that. So you can imagine why somebody might resort to using Dettol, for example. Yeah, and sometimes people's mothers say this is what you should do. There are lots of places where, for instance, water isn't particularly clean. And so adding Dettol to bath water would be just a normal thing that people did. Fine. And again, as long as you're not sloshing it inside the vagina in any way, you can clean your outside part of your body, which is the bulver.

9:49Absolutely fine. And letting water wash over the outside of the vaginal opening. Fine. We're talking about anything pushing or putting soap or water or even, sadly, these sort of FemWash products, things that are actively marketed. They're not the right pH. They're not acidic pH. So you shouldn't really be putting anything like that inside the vagina. And Sally, I've seen people on social media talking about using the fingers or even objects to try and scoop out menstrual fluid. Is there any evidence behind that?

10:23Sally King:Well, this is something that you can do. Again, you have to be really careful with the sort of pH and what you're putting up inside the body. This is a practice that has happened for probably forever since people have been having periods that you, particularly if you get heavier periods, you might not want the flow to be super heavy at any given moment. If you can sort of feel like there's blood in the vaginal canal, which again, if you have heavier flow, you can kind of feel a sort of heaviness, it's called sometimes, in the body. And some people seem to be now, under the term of scooping, removing that menstrual fluid from the vaginal canal, their fingers and things.

11:01My main sort of take home from watching these videos and influencers speak is why do we need to do this? We've had loads of sort of developments in period products over the last 20 or so years. So particularly menstrual cups being really, really great, even for heavy periods, swimming, for any sort of exercise. We have period pants, which are super absorbent. Some of them now you can have very heavy periods and people notice that there's no smell, sort of unlike what can happen with disposable products. If people aren't being taught in school about different period products, how to use them, how to wash the vulva and not to wash the vagina and why not, how to manage if you do get an infection, what should or shouldn't be sort of put inside the vagina.

11:51The fact that this is your body, it's a nice part of your body. It's not necessarily anything to do with sex. It's just a part of you. And it shouldn't be this kind of shameful experience having a period. And so we need to actively challenge that in our teaching and in our way that we think about our own bodies too. And there are times, you know, when for convenience, you know, if you're going on holiday or like you said, you know, you want to exercise or whatever. and people are attempting to shorten the period cycle by taking drinks and these drinks are like um lime juice and and tajine powder which i think is like a kind of mixture of lime and salt um yeah and usually kind of put on fruit or something so they're using that to shorten periods which you know it doesn't sound like it's gonna have that much scientific backing to me no No, it has none.

12:49Sally King:I mean, you don't really have to be a menstrual physiologist to realize that everything you put in this hole doesn't stand much of a chance of getting into the vagina. You know, what we swallow goes into the stomach. You have really strong stomach acids up there that are capable of digesting really most things. Periods are not always the same, even for an individual. So you might do this short drink, and then the next day you have very scant leading or it's just a bit different and you think it works you know this sort of confirmation bias where you're led to believe that something works and that there's a connection between two things and then you're almost looking for evidence to support that belief but the thing with periods is they're very changeable the older you get the more that you have you realize that there's no rhyme nor reason unless as you say if you've booked a swimming holiday, then you're probably going to be on your period.

13:46You know, there's the sort of, the curse of the ill-time period sometimes does strike. And I noticed some of the influencers are saying, it might not work for everyone. But for me, like they're really hedging their vets there. It's not going to work for anybody. Anything that you're eating cannot have a direct

14:05Sally King:and immediate effect on your menstrual cycle or your blood flow. But with the caveat of an anti-inflammatory diet if you stick to a nice anti-inflammatory diet which is really a healthy diet so lots of fresh fruit and veg less processed food low alcohol low caffeine and then anti-inflammatory medications so such as ibuprofen and then there are specific drugs for people for instance with very heavy periods that do reduce the volume of blood that you lose in your period and they do that through an anti-inflammatory action. So for instance, there are some supplements you can take like omega fish oils, even sort of turmeric and things, but the dosage you have to have of turmeric is massive.

14:48Sally King:Really, you're better off sticking to ibuprofen if you want to reduce the volume of menstrual blood and also pain and other cyclical changes that we experience. They're all inflammatory. So anti-inflammatory diet can work, but it's not this immediate stopping. Does it do any damage to continue a contraceptive pill and not have your period? Because that's another thing that I've heard on social media was that you have to have your period because if you don't have it, then dreadful things will happen inside you. Yeah, super interesting. So the origins of this are very much misogyny and anti-women's health, so anti-the pill, basically.

15:29Sally King:So you'll see a lot of well-being and fitness influences, for example, sort of taking a half-truth, which is that periods are a sign of health. Certainly, if you're very ill, you might stop getting periods. For instance, if you have an eating disorder or anorexia, or you're in a very stressful situation, your body might not ovulate, and then you might stop having periods, because your body's thinking you're in too much of a sort of dangerous situation. It wouldn't be safe to, for instance, get pregnant. But it doesn't mean that you should have periods. So actually, a lot of my work is explaining to people and slightly blowing their minds that periods evolved to help protect us from the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth.

16:16Sally King:Whereas I think most people are taught that periods somehow help prepare for a pregnancy. Not true. The period removes everything from inside the womb, including any eggs, which are typically not fertilized. But sometimes, even when they are, it's action. It's very similar to miscarriage. We evolved them to help us identify and mitigate the risk of dangerous pregnancy. So either dangerous to our health or unviable for whatever reason. The fetus isn't viable. So only if you're trying to conceive do you really have to worry about having regular periods because that's what it's evolved for. That doesn't mean that you have to have periods.

17:00And certainly all the research suggests that running your pill on so that you skip a period doesn't cause any harm at all. What can happen if, you know, say you're getting married and you don't normally use the pill and you use it so that you definitely not got your period during your wedding day. That can mess with your natural rhythms. So if you do that and then stop taking the pill again, it might take a few cycles, two to three cycles before you're back into a normal rhythm.

17:26Sally King:and in the meantime you might have a short cycle or a really long cycle. And that's just to do with your circadian rhythm. There's no health impact of stopping a period or, for instance, some contraceptive devices such as Mirena or some of the progestin shots, they stop periods in most people and to no negative effect. And in fact, if, like me, you're anemic or low in iron, it can be very helpful to stop that just so you can restore those iron levels. You see, Sally, I love this about your research. It is so refreshing and it's a perspective that I just hadn't heard before, before I read your work.

18:09I'd never come across that explained like that. Like you say, at school and, well, everything, it's always been about this is your body getting ready for pregnancy.

18:22Sally King:It's tough because that's also what medics are currently taught. So my recent research is looking at textbooks used in medical education in the UK. And first of all, I did a review looking at their menstrual physiology, what's taught about menstruation, for instance. Are we told that its purpose is actually the removal of the contents of the womb, including any eggs, and therefore contraceptive, if you want to give it a technical term, or abortive even in terms of removing potential conception? And the answer is no, they're not given that physiology. And then more recently I reviewed the content of all reproductive functions and the pattern was the same.

19:07Sally King:So any reproductive physiology or functions that are not about conception and having babies are not currently included in general medical education or even gynecological education. So nothing on fibroids, nothing on miscarriage, the physiology of miscarriage, nothing on the role of periods and why we have them. On the other side, there's a movement on social media to kind of celebrate menstrual blood, really celebrate periods. And that's included period masking, which, as you'll know, involves putting menstrual blood on your face, which some influencers swear will really improve your skin somehow.

19:54What's going on there, Sally?

19:56Sally King:I quite like this one. And as far as fads going, you're not really going to damage anyone. Well, other than if you stain anything around you. But menstrual fluid has got stem cells in it. So that's true. That's what most of the influencers are saying, that because menstrual fluid has stem cells in, effectively it's an anti-aging mask so scientifically that's not how the skin works the skin acts as a barrier nothing is going to get into the layers that it would need to to do anything to stop the formation of wrinkles so it's interesting again we have a kind of half truth which is that menstrual fluid on the contrary to what we're led to believe that it's this dirty, shameful fluid that's gross and it stains and it's a sort of signifier of shame that actually it's this wonderful fluid, which it is.

20:49Sally King:And the stem cells that we have in menstrual fluid are unique and they're amazing. So for instance, every cycle, we're stripping a layer of tissue off the inside of the womb and then it regenerates without any scarring. Now this is unique in the body. There's nowhere else in the body where you could slough off a whole layer without there being any scar tissue. So this is why scientists are looking at menstrual fluid and looking at the stem cells in particular to look at wound repair. So particularly heavy burns, deep burns, but even sort of internally. For instance, the type of stem cells we find in menstrual fluid were extracted and used during the COVID pandemic.

21:36And they were injected directly into the lung tissue of people who were dying of COVID. This was before any vaccines. And they found that it saved a much higher percentage of lives than the group that weren't given these stem cells. And this was based on the idea that these stem cells, they replicate more quickly than any other type of stem cell, and they also repair without scar tissue. So the idea being that if they could do that in the lung, then people would be more likely to recover and without any kind of permanent damage to the lungs, which was one of the major reasons why people were dying in that initial pandemic time.

22:17But I'd say in most cases, we're still in the very much the sort of research stage, looking at the use of those stem cells. So the idea that it would already be available on the market, for example, this wouldn't be true. And just rubbing it on your face isn't the same thing. You need a way to get those stem cells inside. And I'm not suggesting anybody injects themselves in menstrual fluid either. Just calm down. We all age, we all die sorry if this is a shock to you it's just life and life is wonderful you know just I quite liked that idea that the menstrual fluid not only wasn't taboo but that you would put it on your face I thought it was kind of great it's just a shame that there's no truth behind that actually being a useful thing just calm down we all edge yeah so because it menstruation is seen as a taboo product or part of the body but also if people dismissed it as not important like as effluent

23:25Sally King:people think think of it like we your poo which it isn't so it's not it's not waste it's not waste no it's um and for instance in other menstruating species some of them reabsorb the tissue instead of having a strong period so there might be some spotting but for whatever reason we have much heavier periods compared to even our other primate cousins so and we also die in in pregnancy and childbirth at much much higher rates than other primates and in fact any other menstruating species. What are the other menstruating species then? Is it it's not just primates is it? Menstruation is very rare.

24:03So it's only 1.6 % of mammals that can menstruate. So it's primates, so orangutans, gorillas, chimps, bonobos, some old world monkeys, so that's smaller monkeys,

24:17Sally King:some bats, so not all bats, but some bats. There's the spiny mouse, which is the only rodent to have a period and it cycles only every nine days. I always feel really sorry for it. but it only has little bits of blood so humans really we have the heavier periods. It's not bad enough being called a spiny mouse. Oh but it's very sweet it's got oh it's a very gorgeous dog mouse and also the elephant shrew which is it looks like a rodent hence it's called a shrew but actually they're related to elephants so it's it's it's interesting that menstruation has evolved several different times on different family genetic lines.

24:56Sally King:And people think dogs have periods because dogs go on heat. And it's a completely different thing. So when a dog is on heat, it's blood and other sort of bits of fluid coming from the vagina. It's not the lining of the womb. It's just blood and other highly scented elements that are indicating to dogs, because dogs are very nose-oriented species, They can smell that the female dog is in heat, which means that they're fertile. So actually, it's advertising that they're ovulating. So it's a completely different thing. We're not like dogs on heat at all. And the other very interesting thing is humans, we conceal ovulation.

25:42So most mammals, nearly all mammals, show in some way when they're ovulating, either with a big red bottom or very clear behavioral changes, scents, smells, all sorts of different things.

25:57Sally King:Whereas we've evolved so that even we don't know if we've ovulated or not. We have no idea. And a lot of our cycles don't have ovulation. And you only sort of know if you have a lighter period, for example, with less pain, it probably means that you didn't ovulate. Or if you're trying to conceive, then you suddenly become aware that you are or you are not ovulating. Sally I'm just trying to be cool about it but you kind of have blown my mind now but if I'd have heard about it when we're younger that would have put a whole different perspective on it instead of it you know being weaponized as something to to bully girls with instead.