So. Unless you are from New Jersey and idolize your home state heroes who are also quacks, you have probably not heard about this new thing called, “Dr. Oz, actual Republican nominee for a seat in the Senate, just went on TV and said that he drank his own urine because he’s been fascinated by urine since he was a kid, but actually it wasn’t that, it was that medical school made him taste his own urine because that’s what medical schools do these days, and that’s fine so long as they aren’t teaching critical race theory or anything.”
This is a very interesting statement for a Senate candidate to make and your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke has some thoughts about this!
To begin with, let me say that I am definitely pro-kink, and if someone does the informed consent thing with themselves and decides to drink their own pee while everyone else is out of the house, that’s fine. (But get your consent in writing!) It can be for curiosity or because it helps you wank or for whatever reason. You do you, okay?
But here’s the thing. Whilst I, personally, am all in favour of kinksters being kinksters, I am aware of some truths about the outside world. One is that drinking pee is not actually good for you. Sure there’s always some bullshit on the internet about some supposed value to the body in drinking your own urine, but that’s all just rationalization. You just wanna drink pee, ya filthy fucker. And that’s okay, once you’ve recorded your consent in triplicate for yourself. But let’s acknowledge facts, eh?
And speaking of those facts, another fact is that despite your local Crip Dyke’s generous attitude for doing your own kink in the privacy of your own local rent-a-dungeon, in addition to being not so good, actually for your health, drinking pee is not so good, actually for your chances of being elected to high offices that require multiple hundreds of thousands of votes to achieve.
I mean, sure, if going on TV and saying, “I totes drank my own pee, doesn’t everybody?” gives you better orgasms, then go ahead. Do your best to get booked on TV shows as many times as you can between now and whenever Maury Povich airs his last, “This DNA test proves they were drinking the wrong pee out of the lunchroom fridge!” episode.
But just as I encourage people to admit that pouring urine in your ear won’t permanently defeat tinnitus and that the real reason they drink pee isn’t because it cures cancer or because med school required piss guzzling in the 1970s & 80s, I also encourage people to get in touch with their outer reality with respect to whether or not going on TV and saying, “Wow, I’m just fascinated with my own peepee and have been since I started using the big potty!” is a valuable contribution to a winning communication strategy for Senate nominees.
So, that said and to sum up: Doc Oz, I encourage you to stay home in New Jersey, drink all the piss you want, and forget about the Senate because the thousand votes you just gained from Pennsylvania piss drinkers is gonna be swamped by the many thousands who are not as generous towards people trying to express their kink into a champagne flute and/or microphone.
This has been my TED talk. Thank you for coming. Or not coming. Or collecting fetish material for later potential coming. Whatever, you perv.
In defense of Oz, a little bit anyway, diagnosis by urine examintion and taste actually goes back a pretty long way. A lot of premodern medical methods don’t hold up, but diabetes and some kidney problems both apparently produce detectable changes. It’s attested in a couple of traditions that I know of.
That said, I would be surprised if 20th century American medical schools recognized this or practiced it seriously, but I could definitely see it coming up. What he did with it from that point forward, I couldn’t imagine.
I’ve definitely heard that urine smells and tastes different depending on diet, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if diabetes produced a change (would it be more sugar or less?) Kidney disorders are a kind of obvious one, you’re right, that would produce changes in which salts, minerals, and metabolites end up in one’s urine. So that, too, would probably make a detectable change.
None of that, however, speaks to the wisdom of running a Senate campaign while announcing you’ve been into pee since you were a kid and tasted it in medical school. I have heard many doctors say that this was in no way something that medical schools required, which is what Oz asserted in a way to minimize his own agency & responsibility. That said, being young and curious and having the same percentage of perverts as the rest of the population, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that certain circles of friends tasted each others’ pee after the topic came up in class.
And, again, go be pervy you wonderfully weird people, you. It’s just that it’s not exactly in your electoral interest to tell that story. And if you don’t have the message discipline to remember not to say, “I’ve been into pee since I was a kid!” on national TV, then maybe you’re setting yourself up for one or two other failures if you run for Senate. I mean, I can’t imagine how the family values crowd is taking this right now.
I’m not British but I’m pretty sure “taking the piss” is not intended as a literal expression. Then again, Oz is using French words to describe his vegetable dip plate to make it sound fancier so maybe it’s just another culture borrowing fail
Aside from silly word jokes though… This is so bizarrely dumb that I don’t know how to even process it. My brain keeps skipping past it without really parsing any of it as though it’s part of some horrible Things Reasonable People Were Not Meant to Know.
I guess I should spell out that the potential kink aspect doesn’t really bother me. I wouldn’t want anyone to read that as kink shaming. Mostly I just keep wondering why he’d talk about it on TV.
Kink-with-informed-consent is great, and I have no problems with people doing whatever makes them happy, etc. etc.
However, not being USian I’m just wondering about the general point regarding affecting election prospects. On the one hand, it seems to me like Oz is an opportunistic grifter consisting of an empathy and morality vacuum, filled with ambition and stuffed into a suit. On the other hand, isn’t that what Republican voters like?
I mean, given the propensity for guzzling horse dewormer and bleach, I’m not so sure this will do much to sway anyone who wasn’t already going to vote for someone else anyway. After all, the typical conservative approach seems to be that it isn’t about what you do, but rather who you are – “those people are bad, because they’re those people; our people are good because they’re our people”. Even in the rare cases that there is blowback against “one of the good ones”, normally they just have to mumble something about “forgiveness” and it all becomes water under the bridge.
I could see Republicans turning against Oz because he isn’t considered “one of them”, or because Trump endorses someone else, or he’s not sufficiently cruel, or whatever – but would this really make any difference?
Purely for entertainment: I clearly recall seeing footage on the BBC of a real-life lecture in a medical school. Lecturer (a doctor) had a student volunteer up front, and was talking about the need to be observant when dealing with patients. He demonstrated by “observing” a patient’s urine sample. He dipped in a finger, then stuck a finger in his mouth, and talked about sugar in the urine being indicative of diabetes. He offered the sample to the student, who dutifully dipped in his finger, then (as his colleagues chuckled and groaned), dutifully tasted it. Lecturer then reiterated the importance of observation, and noted that unlike the lecturer, the student had tasted the same finger he’d dipped in the piss. Cue gales of laughter from audience. No idea whether it really was urine in the bottle.
Super late to this, and… all I’ve got is random anecdotal bullshit…
I spent a lot of my youth (pre-internet), reading everything I could access through various public libraries and used bookstores about “Wilderness Survival”, and, from my not-at-all-unbiased sampling and even-less-faulty recolllection, the idea of drinking urine in a survival situation seemed to be… completely random as to it’s efficacy? I imagine a lot of it has to do with how hydrated the person producing the urine is. Aside from that, I vaguely remember recommendations to use urine to wash/irrigate wounds in areas/environs where clean water is scarce, as contrary to common internet opinion, urine isn’t sterile, but barring STIs, UTIs, and similar, there is rarely anything pathogenic, to the point that it’s probably a better choice for wound irrigation than random jungle puddle water (not exactly a high bar…)
Another weird anecdote, when working in a hospital, I remember there being an issue with ants trying to access the walk-in freezer. Low-level and completely unsubstantiated gossip, was that it was because of the number of urine samples from diabetic patients in the freezer, and the ants were drawn because of the sugar present in the diabetic patient’s urine samples. I also suspect the ants leaving a chemical trail to the freezer, and then dying a foot in or so, probably contributed to the other ants following them…
I also have a vague recollection of some… one? spouting off about urine being a covid-19 cure/whatever, and then posting about bringing a batch of urine-dosed cupcakes/brownies/whatever to their kid’s classroom to “rescue” all the children of people who didn’t recognize the “wonders” of “urine therapy”
eh, probably won’t hurt you (aside from extreme cases of dehydtration/medical conditions), but also probably won’t help you, and well, technology has advanced quite a bit since learning that drinking the urine of a reindeer(?) that ate a hallucinogenic mushroom was slightly less unpleasant than eating the hallucinogenic mushroom personally.
I’ve a bit of faith in some of the more simplistic concepts of natural selection, and that if my body is in dire need of some chemical, it’s probably not going to also needlessly excrete that chemical, unless it’s necessary to also excrete a more harmful chemical (that I really don’t want to be re-ingesting…(with caveats to processes like perspiration, where the product excreted is less about usefulness to the body, then usefulness to the process?…))
drinking urine, as long as it’s not in excess/in lieu of other fluids/in extreme conditions, I don’t think will be necessarily harmfull, but I doubt it will provide any more benefit than any random breakfast sandwich and glass of orange juice. And doubtful to be anywhere near as pleasant… (unless you’re into that sorta thing, but even if you are, you probably aren’t reliant on it for…”health benefits”)
5) @sonofrojblake: Are you sure you’re not thinking of this scene from 1982’s Young Doctors in Love? If they stole the idea from the BBC, it’s downright plagiaristic.
Look on the bright side, folks — at least he’s not urging us to drink something we have to buy from him!
This could be the least scammy thing he’s ever said!
On a more serious note, this whole piss-drinking thing is “Dr” Oz pandering to a longstanding strain of nostalgia that many people have for “authentic” or “old-timey” medical practices that supposedly carry some sort of ancient truth or folk-wisdom that our mad mad modern world has buried or forgotten. Lots of people are worried or skeptical of present-day high-tech medicine (not always without good reason, I should add); and there’s lots of con-artists who can see an easy career in hawking all sorts of ancient-folk-medicine ideas their marks might have already heard about from their own ancestors or from their home provinces’ folk-tales or gossip.
Oz’s piss-drinking shenanigans aren’t evil or dangerous so much as stupid, lazy, and apparently scraping the bottom of the barrel of alt-med scams. Also, openly talking about how fascinated he is with his own pee since his potty-training days, kind of strongly hints that he’s lost track of how to act like a credible grownup. Or that — like too many other high-profile Retrumplitarians — he doesn’t think he has to care anymore. That’s the scary bit here.
This is, indeed, my primary criticism here. If you can’t pretend to be senatorial in the campaign, what are the odds you’ll actually do the things a senator needs to do to help the nation once elected?
Maybe he is part fly.
As someone with gout, who is careful about the salt levels in my pee, the last thing I would want to do is ingest the carbonates my kidneys already filtered out and concentrated in my pee. It’s the stuff your body has worked hard to get rid of!
From the typical composition I can tell you what it’ll taste like: mildly salty. No need to check.