But Why (Oh God, Why?) Would Anyone Use Pee as a Health Tonic?

Before we knew much about medicine, people would just kinda try things (like bloodletting or eating mercury, for instance) hoping to cure patients of whatever it was that ailed them. If the person happened to get better, they would believe they found a cure. People get better for all kinds of reasons, though – it doesn’t mean that losing a few pints of blood cured them. In reality, it probably made it much harder for them to recover.

• 

Urine “therapy” was used in India, China, Mexico, Egypt and many other places as early as 5000 years ago. Urine was used as a “curative” by Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist and philosopher, for treatment of a variety of injuries and illnesses. Pliny wrote a treatise called “Natural History” which was considered a scientific and medical authority by European scholars and physicians from 77 AD through the Middle Ages. (You can read more about his fascinating life here.) He also believed that you could cure a scorpion sting by rubbing semen on it or that women who are sterile should “use” the first poop of a newly born infant to treat the sting. (How one is meant to “use” the feces is not clear – by eating them?, using them as a lotion?, douching with them? Your guess is as good as mine.) We know that baby poop doesn’t cure anything besides one’s desire to remain in the same room as the kid.

Pliny was not the only famous healer who (regrettably) advised people to use urine as a curative. A famous 16th century surgeon advised patients to use urine that had sat in a barber’s basin overnight to rub on their itchy eye lids. Lots of things cause itchy eyelids, such as allergens, bacterial infections and problems with the glands around the eyelid. I did a quick survey of the literature and no one suggested curing these things with urine, thank goodness! Here is a short summary on itchy eyelids.  More recently, the anti-“Big Pharma” and the “natural” health craze have paved the way for “urine therapy” to become popular again.

So, before we begin this journey into the use of pee-pee as a health tonic, it is important to note that urine has not been shown in any studies to cure acne or help one lose weight. In fact, there is no evidence that urine cures anything at all. Nonetheless, people have used urine as a “medicine” in one form or another throughout history. Sorry for the disclaimer, but it had to be done.

Modern fans of urine therapy, also called “urotherapy” (or “urophagia,” when drinking it) think that it can be used to “treat” all kinds of ailments. Practitioners believe it can whiten teeth and rejuvenate the skin. Some believe (wrongly) that it can cure stuffy noses, influenza, general infections, allergies, infertility, acne (and a ton of other skin ailments), heart issues, and cancer. One woman (on the TV show Strange Addictions – here is part of the episode) thought it would help cure her melanoma (skin cancer) so she drank it, rinsed her eyes with it and used it in a neti-pot*.

The theory behind urine’s cancer fighting properties is that urine contains tumor proteins and when you absorb them, your body will produce cancer fighting antigens. This begs the questions: Why would you need more tumor proteins if you already have cancer? Why aren’t the cancer fighting antigens your body already produces to fight the cancer enough? Unfortunately, the amount of tumor proteins found in urine is so tiny that it wouldn’t make a difference even if the theory made any kind of sense. There are a few studies on the use of urea (a urine component) to treat some conditions. One study examined urea to treat hyponatremia (low blood sodium level) when it occurs in someone with cerebral salt wasting syndrome, (Pierrakos, Taccone, Decaux, Vincent, & Brimioulle, 2012). In another study, it was used to treat Infantile hemangioma, a kind of tumor in children and infants, (Zhu et al., 2018). These are very rare and specific cases for which urea is used to treat a condition. The urea (not urine) was synthesized and used in a way that ensured it was sterile. This is in stark contrast to peeing in a glass and drinking or washing your face in it.

Why is Urine Consumption Bad for You?

If someone would have told me a year ago that I would research the question: Why is urine consumption bad for you, I would have not believed them. Still, one has to wonder: what are the consequences of this practice (aside from the ick factor)? Just in case you were pondering this very thing, read on.

Urine is produced in the kidneys, two small bean-shaped organs located on either side of your spine. The kidneys remove waste products from your blood through a complex process that takes place in a network of tubes. Kidneys filter out the stuff you don’t need (waste products, excess nitrogen salts, etc), and the puts good stuff you do need back into the blood. The bad stuff and the leftover water are sent to the bladder, where they are stored as urine until you excrete it though the urethra.

Urine is more than 90% water. The other ingredients are ammonia, sugars, chemicals like urea (from which urine is named), salts, and those nasty waste products that your body needs to get rid of. It can also contain excess medicine, pathogens, and toxicants if you have any of that stuff in your system – this is a good reason not to rub it on your skin or put it up your nose. Your urinary tract can be thought of as a part of your bodies sewage treatment system. As a toxicologist, we learn that the body’s essential way of dealing with xenobiotic compounds is to make them easier to get rid of by peeing them out. It’s an important way that your body protects you from compounds that might be dangerous for your health.

Another surprising thing I learned is that when you excrete urine, it picks up bacteria from colonies that live in the bladder and urethra. That old wives’ tale that urine is sterile is not true at all! And remember that episode of “Friends” where Monica got stung by a jelly fish and Joey and Chandler had to pee on the sting? That was a bad idea too. (And super weird. C’mon, “Friends” writers.) According to this article, peeing on jellyfish stings can make the pain worse. You can read more about real jellyfish sting remedies in this study.

Drinking pee is not a good idea either. Since urination is part of the bodies method to get rid of excess waste products, when you drink it, you are forcing your kidneys to remove stuff that has already been filtered and removed. This can put excessive stress on your kidneys. You could also be re-ingesting toxins, medicine, and bacteria which could make you sick. Drinking urine won’t rehydrate you either. Your kidneys would need more water than is in your urine just to (re) filter out the minerals and salts contained in your pee. If you are ever stranded on a deserted island with no water, don’t drink your pee.

Conclusion

There is no scientific evidence that there is any benefit to drinking or otherwise absorbing your own urine and several reasons why it could be harmful. While drinking (or using it on your skin, hair, eyes, or sinuses) urine isn’t necessarily harmful, there is nothing that it will do for you for which there isn’t a better, more pleasant treatment available. If a medical product sounds like it might cure everything from weight gain to cancer, that means that it likely doesn’t cure anything at all. Remember: “Cure-alls cure nothing!” (Thank you Sawbones!)

In case you were wondering, no I haven’t tried urine therapy. Not even for science.

---

End note:

*A neti-pot is used to irrigate your sinuses by flushing them with liquid (usually salt water) via the nostrils. You pour it in one side of your nose, and it comes out the other, presumably with all the toxins or pathogens that were making you sick. You can feel it as it travels though your sinuses and it’s not unpleasant when using saline, however using urine just sounds gross.

Reference

Pierrakos, C., Taccone, F. S., Decaux, G., Vincent, J.-L., & Brimioulle, S. (2012). Urea for treatment of acute SIADH in patients with subarachnoid hemorrhage: a single-center experience. Annals of intensive care, 2(1), 13-13. doi:10.1186/2110-5820-2-13

Zhu, X., Guo, X., Liu, D., Gong, Y., Sun, J., & Dong, C. (2018). Significant inhibition of infantile hemangioma growth by sustained delivery of urea from liposomes-in-microspheres. Oncol Rep, 39(1), 109-118. doi:10.3892/or.2017.6103

Share