I’ve heard of drinking urine, but…


injecting urine? No thanks.

It seems that some people have had the brilliant idea of treating allergies with home injections of urine, because there are antibodies present in urine, and therefore you’ll make antibodies to your own antibodies? What?

You see, you first eat the substance you’re allergic to, triggering an immune response. Then you pee urine that has lots of those antibodies (actually, it won’t be lots — if you’re leaking lots of protein into your urine, you have a problem), and then you inject 10ml of that urine, which will have a lower concentration of those antibodies than your own blood, into your butt, which will then make your immune system generate antibodies against your antibodies…oh, fuck it. This is just nonsense through and through.

But apparently it’s a thing. People are also collecting urine from pregnant women and shooting themselves up with it to help them lose weight, because there’s a hormone in it.

It’s human coriogonic gotrophin, said Iris McCarthy of Success Weight Loss Systems.

Never trust a Weight Loss Technician who can mangle human chorionic gonadotropin that badly.

Then there’s the gentleman who injected himself intravenously with his own urine, “to maximize his vitality and potency, as he had developed nausea and vomiting twice after drinking his urine orally”. Yeah, I can see how nausea and vomiting are unpleasant. Almost as bad, as the paper this story comes from describes, nearly dying of acute sepsis.

People: Urine is a waste product. Your body works hard to get rid of it. It’s not beneficial to take it back in, because then you’ll just have to pump it back out again. Trust me on this. Do not pump your butt full of pee. Do not inject it into your veins. Don’t drink it.

Comments

  1. says

    I recently ended my English lesson 10 min early to give the students time to revise for their upcoming biology exam. They were doing it under the table anyway. Subject was bacteria, viruses, diseases and vaccinations.
    As I helped them decipher their own handwriting and giving some quick explanations, they started the good old “why do we neeeeeeeeeed this” lament.
    I told them that when they later in life encountered claims about something being good for their health, they could evaluate them and say “this cannot work, this is not how those things function”.

  2. says

    They should hit on the old trick of putting a hose from the exhaust pipe up into the cab of the car, so they can inoculate themselves to inhaled bad ideas. Surely that’d help!

  3. matterhorncyn says

    Isn’t part of the history of the discovery of penicillin have to do with distilling the urine of an English soldier to prove it effects? Distilling urine is completely different from drinking your own however.

  4. weylguy says

    Sewing monkey and goat glands into gullible people was all the rage in the 1920s, as quack doctors believed it imbued their patients with energy and sexual vitality. Like the 18th-century notion that suppuration (pus formation) was a sure sign that bleeding and similar medical procedures were beneficial, I suppose that uremic septicemia is likewise viewed by today’s homeopathic nuts as a sign of good health.

  5. KG says

    From the urine-injector link:

    Psychological assessment did not reveal any abnormalities.

    …apart from chronic stupidity, presumably.

    On second thoughts, recent political events in the USA and UK show quite conclusively that there’s nothing abnormal about that.

  6. dhabecker says

    I didn’t realize that when someone tells me to ‘Eat shit, MF!!!”, they are actually giving me health tips.

  7. vucodlak says

    Never trust a Weight Loss Technician

    Really, you should just end that sentence there. I’m sure there are a couple of “Weight Loss Medical Specialists” who aren’t dangerous quacks peddling junk science, but they’d be very much the exception, not the rule.

  8. johnlee says

    i seem to remember that Gandhi used to drink a glass of his own urine every day. I seems a very bizarre thing to do.

  9. efogoto says

    @9 According to this Newsweek article, that was a follower of Gandhi, not the man himself – though it’s a follow up to a 1995 article where it was, indeed, claimed that Gandhi drank his own urine.

  10. Nogbert says

    #3 matterhorncyn This is from memory so might need checking. What I read a long time ago was that they tried it out first on a policeman with sepsis who was close to death. I think it all started from a cut on his finger, which is enough to give pause in the looming post anti biotic era. The penicillin was working, the poor fellow was starting to recover but even with recycled penicillin from his urine they ran out completely. The patient relapsed and died.
    If one should find oneself in the unfortunate position of being lost at sea without water is it better to collect urine and drink it or go without? I assume urine is less harmful than sea water.

  11. robro says

    …first eat the substance you’re allergic to…

    And if that causes anaphylaxis? Skip the pissing and grab an EpiPen?

  12. unclefrogy says

    when you are anti-science and obstinately ignorant any story that holds together internally regardless of how much it diverges from reality and promises cures , health and vitality will be believed. because magic
    make america great again
    uncle frogy

  13. jazzlet says

    Nogbert you are right about the first patient they tested penicillin on, he had had a minor cut while gardening which got infected, by the time they came to test the penicillin on him he was dying, he was making an incredible recovery when treated with the penicillin, but they ran out before he was completely well and, as you say, he relapsed and died. Always makes me rather sad.

    One of the odious Mrs Thatcer’s quirks was urine drinking and she really ought to have known better, mind she was a chemist not a biologist, but still.

  14. microraptor says

    I worked with a guy who tried the “inject myself with chorionic gonadotropin to lose weight” thing. He thought it was really working while he was on his 500 calorie per day diet.

  15. Hairhead, Still Learning at 59 says

    I have an older friend. In 1961 he was working his way through University doing landscaping. He managed to stab his hand with a dirty garden fork. In only a couple of days, his hand was badly swollen, and strange white lines were appearing, growing from the hand up his forearm.
    So he went to the doctor, who calmly examined the hand and prescribed a week-long course of penicillin. My friend was instructed to follow the dosing protocol religiously, and to come back a week later. On that visit, the doctor examined the now-healed hand, then said the following, “Fifteen years ago if you had come to me with a hand like that, we’d have had the hand amputated within two hours, and even then you’d still have had a 50/50 chance of dying of blood poisoning. Thanks to penicillin, you are cured. You can keep the ‘good old days’,”

  16. birgerjohansson says

    I know this guy in Washington who thinks everyone has a fixad number of heartbeats so you should avoid excercise.
    I suggest you tell him he can extend the number of heartbeats by injecting urine, and drinking more diet coke.

  17. mykroft says

    As I recall the Romans used to gargle with urine, to keep their teeth white. Not the same as drinking it, but still for a health-related purpose.

  18. Mrdead Inmypocket says

    Clearly the professor here is part of the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Sowing the seeds of doubt of the benefits of taking those fluids back into yourself. Why, I recently just had a catheter implanted straight into my carotid artery. I resemble nothing if not a Borg drone with a yellowish hue rather than green and I feel fine.

    I tried, I really did try and work that around to a pun about “taking the piss out of you” but I just couldn’t get there. Sorry for that. Would have been brilliant if I could have.

  19. birgerjohansson says

    I can’t wait for the robot uprising, when we will get replaced by hygienic intelligences, without squishy bits and fluids.

  20. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    Psychological assessment did not reveal any abnormalities.

    Unfortunately there’s no current test for ideopathy.

  21. Artor says

    I knew a guy once who swore by the health benefits of drinking your own urine. Unsurprisingly, he was one of the most revolting examples of humanity I have ever known. Surprisingly, it wan’t his dietary habits that qualified him for that.
    But he couldn’t figure out why he had recurring gout, after sitting in front of his computer all day & night, cycling the same jug of increasingly concentrated urine through his system over and over.

  22. Artor says

    Birgerjohanssen@17
    Make sure to tell him the guy who worked his job previously said it was a bad idea.

  23. rietpluim says

    Well, at least we learned from this story that you can inject urine intravenously without killing yourself. Interesting, didn’t know that.

  24. prae says

    Sepsis from urine? I thought that stuff is supposed to be sterile, unless you are taking it from a sick person?

  25. Raucous Indignation says

    @25 prea, urine is sterile in a healthy individual. BUT it is very easily contaminated as it is an excellent growth medium for certain pathogenic bacteria. And you could’ve gotten urine that was already harboring a UTI. Which you then inject into your bloodstream. Voilà! Spesis!