As unappealing the concept may be to our synthetic western minds the liturature I’ve read actually makes a lot of sense,with plenty of historical precedence by some pretty enlightened cultures to support it.
So what are the health hazards, if any, of drinking your own urine?. The only one I can think of is if you have a urinary tract infection that contaminates it…but then again, urine contains highly effective anti-bacteria.
Cecil did a pretty comprehensive column on this, but I couldn’t find it in the archives. It’s in one of his books.
Yer pal,
Satan
Ureic Acid. You ‘piss’ it out. If you drink urine, you are concentrating the amount of waste products in your body and placing a load on your system. Ureic Acid is one. It forms crystals in the joints when the levels are too high, causing much pain. (I can’t think of the name for it, but it was a common ailment about 100 years ago and Charles Dickens mentions it in his works, mainly in the feet of rich folks from eating too well.)
Not to mention ammonia. Urine can be consumed in times of dire need, for the water content and possibly, salt, but you excrete various forms of bacteria, various concentrations of mineral salts, hormones, ‘run over’ sperm, and so on. (If you take something like about 200 gallons of female urine, boil it down in a big pot, you get a tiny amount of crystals left, which are actually a male aphrodisiac. The Chinese – who else? – discovered this about 500 years ago.) They didn’t mention what they did with all of the other crystallized salts and minerals that would have also formed – nor how anyone liked the stench.
What? Me worry?’
Rainbowcsr, the illness you’re thinking of is “gout”.
Will work for sig line.
Related MPSIMS topic:
“Foods you adore that everyone around you absolutely hates”
Remind me not to have a drink at your house, Wolf. 
Here is an interesting page talking about…
Seems there is a lot of good stuff in there along with the bad.
If you can’t convince them, confuse them.
Harry S. Truman
Slightly related: a trick I learned from Hawai’ian surfers is to pee on your foot if you step on a sea urchin-- your urine will dissolve the quill and your own pee won’t hurt you in that manner. Yay!
In other words, urine luck!
Cecil’s Straight Dope on urine drinking.
Gout is right, and isn’t it uric acid?
Two side notes:
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Gout is indescribably painful. I know. When a flareup hits, I can’t even put on socks. Thank the gods for indomethacin.
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Peeing on jellyfish stings helps, too. (Divemaster…verify?)
Remember when Chandler pissed on Monica’s leg when she got stung?
Our synthetic western minds? Has the population become so separated from the past that we forget once apon a time there were things called epidemics? If swigging piss were all that was required to maintain good health why would medicine have developed at all?
As for drinking dried “girl-piss” as an aphrodisiac, should the need arise (pun?) I’ll go with the modern convienence of Viagra.
Common sense would seem to dictate if all those folk cures had any effect, there would never have been any need to develop medicine at all. Small pox was not eliminated by a mixture of herbs and berries.
This is not saying I don’t believe medicine can be derived from plants or natural scources, I just question anyone who dismisses western civilization as an artificial construct. It’s real, I actually live there. Try it, if your not satisfied after 2 weeks, simply return to fantasy island and resume your life.
Opps, got caught up in my rant and forgot the main reason I hit reply.
Jelly fish stings can be eased by urine, but a far more effective remedy is a newer innovation. Meat tenderizer topicly and antihistamines. Maybe a bit artificial for the new age crowd, but it does work.
‘Jelly fish?’ oh, man, you got to check this out but they don’t call them that anymore, they are now called, ‘Sea Jellies’ I think.
Don’t think you can whip it out at the beach & pee. But wet sand does the same thing and you won’t get arrested
Well if you ever have a bladder infection, you know urine trouble.
There are hollow posts set in the sand along many Australian beaches. Inside are bottles of vinegar. They’re supposed to be used for jellyfish stings.
That makes me wonder…is jellyfish venom an alkali, then?
How about that for straying from the original topic?
Drinking one’s own urine is not healthy at all, for reasons stated in the previous posts. It can be consumed in an emergency if one is dying of thirst, but probably by that time, you have no piss to drink or else it is so concentrated that consuming it would make you ill. If you try to save it, well, it goes bad real fast. Urine is sterile to the body of the person who produces it but not to another body or environment. Once out of the body, bacterial contamination in it will flourish rapidly.
Then again, people seem to develop weird tastes, like the placenta eating party I read about. It’s not illegal. Some nut and his nut wife had a kid and after reading some crap based on animals eating the afterbirth and how it MUST be good for humans if ‘wise’ animals do it and decided to do it also. He invited like minded friends and a chef and they had a little dinner party featuring fried human uterus.
Some people have FAR too much time and money on their hands.
CORRECTION: Fried human placenta (after birth).
Thanks everyone…and uh EvilGhandi I think where you’re living is closer to fantasy Island. Of course Western Culture is synthetic. What’s your life with electricity, hot water sewage. We’ll soon see how much you actually know about life and this planet without those artifice and how quickly you come to practical solutions without Channel X telling you what to do.
Oh and what brought about the rise of orthodox medicine if mother nature provides all? POssibly money EGhandi? Unless they put a meter on my wang its pretty hard to make money out of me if I’m not stuffing my guts full of their anti biotocs. Rant ends now :0)