Urine therapy

Yacky or ewww? It depends on what you know!

Urine therapy is not a homeopathic practice unique to boxer Juan Manuel Marquez. The apparent wackiness of the act is just magnified by the irony being tied up to his claims of energy and strength that would finally settle an “unfinished business” with our Pambansang Kamao.

Matter of fact is, it’s ancient India which exposed the concept that our ultra-intelligent body concocts its own medicine. That gag feeling at the thought of reconsuming our own urine stems from how we were taught to think what kind of substance urine is.

Today’s Indian practitioners call the act AUT or Auto-Urine Therapy. “Sometimes when all else fails, AUT will turn a patient around. The first question that probably comes to mind is whether urine is a toxic substance and how a waste product excreted from the body can be of any benefit for our health,” lifepositive.com said.

“Urine is not a toxic waste product,” claim AUT practitioners. “They cite that 95 percent of urine is water, 2.5 percent consists of urea, and the remaining 2.5 percent is a mixture of minerals, salt, hormones and enzymes.”

In 1975, one of the founders of Miles Laboratories – Dr. A.H.Free - published his book “Urinalysis in Clinical Laboratory Practice,” in which he remarked that “not only is urine a sterile body compound (purer than distilled water), but that it is now recognized that urine contains literally thousands of compounds.”

Among the urine constituents mentioned in Dr. Free’s treatise is a list of nutrients that will knock your socks off. In fact, biomedx.com described urine to be “a nutrient rich powerhouse.” Here’s just a few – alanine, arginine, ascorbic acid, allantoin, amino acids, bicarbonate, biotin, calcium, creatinine, cystine, dopamine, epinephrine, folic acid, glucose, glutamic acid, glycine, inositol, iodine, iron, lysine, magnesium, manganese, melatonin, methionine, nitrogen, ornithane, pantothenic acid, phenylalaline, phosphorus, potassium, proteins, riboflavin, tryptophan, tyrosine, urea, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, zinc. Whew! That’s a bladder-ful!

“Stories have been told of individuals who have both lived and died by being trapped in places without food and water for days. Those that survived did so because they drank their own urine, those that perished did not. The ones that died probably could not overcome the misinformed thoughts that urine is a waste product of the body,” biomedx.com stressed.

With regards to personal experience, I was able to try urine homeopathic fashion at a young age. This was for the treatment of sore eyes. No gulping down, though! I was in grade school then and I learned that aside from lactating mom’s milk, midstream urine collected in the early morning would be helpful. A clean cup or container and genital area washed thoroughly beforehand ensure clean catch. And then I was told to wash my eyes with the catch, tapping the swollen area mildly, then the eyelids. It somehow worked!

Another instance was when sea urchins punctured the sole of my right foot while I was frolicking in waist-deep water on a weekend foray in Daanbantayan. One of my colleagues suggested to pee on my sole (in the name of first aid). The acid component of urine, according to him, would help the stuck spines fall off as they go brittle in the succeeding hours. It worked wonders, merci! 

As for Pacman, he exhibited squeamishness at the thought of AUT. “Mas okay pa sa akin tamaan na lang ng suntok kesa uminom ng sarili kong ihi,” he said in one of his recent interviews.

Meanwhile, JuanMa is out to prove that not only were the past two encounters he had with Pacman questionable. He also has to make the world believe that this time his urine will do him a lot of good. If he loses his bid once more, people are sure to surmise that he could have had a drink too many. As always, anything taken in excess is bad for anybody’s body. And for a career too!

Now, that’s pissing one’s life away!