I am standing on the lip of a concrete-walled pool in the middle of Turkey with Yunus, the best English speaker here. Hundreds of dark, finger-sized fish gather in a flickering mass below our feet.
"They know we are here," Yunus says. "They are hungry."
We dip our hands into the pool. The fish rush over, twist and contort to get at a piece of skin, then bump and nibble. It feels a bit ticklish, and I cannot keep my hand in for more than a few seconds. Some people immerse themselves from the neck down for hours at a time. They believe these fish have medicinal powers.
The doctor fish of Kangal, members of the carp family, have gone from local myth to a sales product and the subject of Internet testimonials. But you don't have to believe in wonder cures to try them. The fish are used for simple enjoyment, too, in spas from Ireland to Japan.
Word of fish with healing abilities first spread in 1917. A local shepherd dipped an injured leg in a spring, and fish gathered to eat the damaged skin around the wound, prompting locals to try them out for other maladies. The story has grown in spurts since then. In the 1950s, locals walled off the spring to prevent the fish from escaping.
In 1979 came a five-storey hotel. Five Turkish brothers leased the spring and environs from the government in 1992 and added villas, a playground, restaurant and Internet café. The resort, the Balikli Kaplica (Fish Spring), is 15 kilometres from the village of Kangal, at the end of a road snaking through foothills. About 3,000 people a year visit the carp, known as G arra rufa in the science world and called doctor fish or nibble fish by cure seekers. Most who come suffer from psoriasis, a recurring skin condition that causes red blotches topped with silvery flakes. They drink from the spring's mineral-rich water before breakfast and then feed themselves to the fish, waiting in four large pools, sometimes for four hours a day. While the nibble fish eat away the diseased skin within three weeks, the blotches and flakes typically return within months.
The Balikli Kaplica drew international attention in 1999 when psoriasis patients from Germany came on a buying spree, scooping up fish to take home from several areas in the country. Supply now comes mainly from breeders in Europe and Asia. Prices peaked at roughly $90 a fish in 1999, though they now go for $35 to $70 apiece, said Thomas Gularas, a psoriasis sufferer in Fernblick, Austria. He breeds and sells fish and owns a psoriasis-treatment spa there. There are two other such clinics in Austria, and more in Croatia, Serbia, Germany and Ireland. The European spas usually offer individual bathtubs, each stocked with 150 to 300 carp, which some prefer to the group pools in Turkey.
The fish are a natural fit in spa-mad Japan, where they are used to clean dead skin from feet. There are at least 27,000 natural-spring spas there, many touting esoteric treatments such as facials using bull semen, nightingale droppings or gold leaf. Hakone Kowakien Yunessen, one of Japan's first spas to feature Garra rufa, also offers soaking pools of coffee, green tea, sake, wine or water with salt imported from the Dead Sea.
At least three other spas in Japan use the fish, as does one in South Korea at Daemyung Resort, near Gyeongju. The fish are also deployed at Underwater World, a Singapore marine theme park that is adding spa capabilities and marketing the G arra rufa as "fish reflexology."
In China, a company called Chengdu Joyda Amusement Co. claims to have trained its carp in massage therapy.
