Urine therapy

My previous column was about reflexology, the technique of eliminating pain and other symptoms of illness by applying pressure to various spots on the foot. This column concerns an equally crazy therapy that also is currently bamboozling gullible persons captivated by alternative medicines.

From ancient times, folk superstitions have involved the fancied healing properties of three bodily secretions: saliva, excrement, and urine.

These reputed healing properties are detailed ad nauseam in Lynn Thorndike's monumental History of Magic and Experimental Science. Here I shall be concerned only with urine, either swallowed, injected, or applied externally to the skin. What follows are a few highlights from Thorndike.

Pliny the Elder, in Natural History, extols the healing powers of urine obtained from a virgin boy. Arnald of Villanova, a thirteenth-century Spanish astrologer, alchemist, and physician, claimed that warts would vanish if a dog's urine is applied to them. He also said vision would be greatly improved by washing one's eyes every morning with one's urine. Thorndike further cites an ancient Arabic treatise discussing the healing power of a white elephant's urine.

Urine was a popular folk medicine throughout the seventeenth century. Thorndike gives many references. Emmanuel Konig, of Basel, in his book The Animal Kingdom (1683) recommended drinking one's urine to heal heartburn, depression, gout, toothaches, colic, jaundice, and high fevers. Daniel Bockher, a German physician, in 1622 published a popular work titled Medicus Microcosmos. It praises the healing properties of urine, excrement, lice, sperm, tapeworms, and ear wax.

Pierre Fauchard, a Parisian dentist, is considered the founder of modern dentistry. In 1728 he published Le Chirurgien Dentiste (The Surgeon Dentist), a classic text translated into English in the 1940s. In this work he pokes fun at several ridiculous remedies for toothache, then proceeds to describe a novel remedy of his own. I quote from James J. Walsh's entertaining Cures: The Story of the Cures that Fail (1923):

I have brought a great deal of relief to a number of patients who had nearly all their teeth carious and who as a consequence were often tormented by pains and aches . . . by means of the following remedy. It consists of rinsing out the mouth every morning and also evening . . . with some spoonfuls of their own urine, just after it has been passed . . . it is true that it is not very agreeable, except inasmuch as it brings distinct relief.

Fouchard goes on to say that some of his patients who used this remedy told him that the urine also provided relief from other health problems. Indeed, "experience has shown that urine of healthy persons is very good for relieving the pains of gout and getting rid of obstructions of various kinds throughout the body."

Robert Boyle (1627-1691) was a great British scientist best known to physicists today for "Boyle's law," which states that the volume of a gas varies inversely with its pressure. Thorndike quotes the following passages from Boyle's Works (Vol. 2, page 130):

The medical virtues of man's urine, both inwardly given, and outwardly applied, would require rather a whole book, than a part of an essay, to enumerate and insist on . . . I shall now only add, that I knew an ancient gentlewoman, who being almost hopeless to recover of divers chronical distempers . . . was at length advised, instead of more costly physick, to make her morning draughts of her own water; by the use of which she strangely recovered, and is, for aught I know, still well. And the same remedy is not disdained by a person of great quality and beauty, that you know; and that too after she had travelled as far as the Spaw for her health's sake.

Urine therapy is most widely used today in Hindu folk medicine. William Jarvis, writing in the newsletter of the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) (March/April 1995), reported that India's former Prime Minister (1977-1979) Morarji Desai on his ninety-ninth birthday, in February 1995, attributed his longevity to a constant drinking of his own urine. In 1978 Dan Rather, on CBS's 60 Minutes, interviewed Desai, who spoke at length about the great value of drinking urine. Newsweek reported (August 21, 1995) that Mohandas Gandhi was a urine drinker, but this was later denied by India's Gandhi Institute.

In the July/August 1991 issue of the NCAHF Newsletter, Jarvis cites numerous urine-based remedies that are promoted by ayurvedic medicine. Alcoholism, anorexia, nausea, poor digestion, edema, and other ills respond to "goat feces prepared by washing in urine." For constipation, drink a mixture of milk and urine. Epilepsy and other seizures yield to donkey urine. Urine is called the "water of life" in ayurvedic medicine. G. K. Thakker, director of the Water of Life foundation in Bombay, believes that urine drinking can cure every illness from the common cold to cancer.

Helen Kruger, in her excellent book Other Healers, Other Cures: A Guide to Alternative Medicine (1974) has this to say about urine therapy: