URINE THERAPY A Natural Alternative That Works
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 3, #2 (February-March 1996). PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
© 1994 by Martha M. Christy Extracted with permission from Chapters 1 and 2 of her book Your Own Perfect Medicine Published in 1994 by FutureMed, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
AN AMAZING UNTOLD STORY
WHAT MODERN SCIENCE KNOWS ABOUT A MIRACLE MEDICINE (AND ISN'T TELLING)
There is an extraordinary natural healing substance, produced by our own bodies, that modern medical science has proven to be one of the most powerful natural medicines known to man. Unlike many other natural medical therapies, this method requires no monetary investment or doctor's intervention and can be easily accessed and used at any time.
The extensive medical research findings on this natural medicine have never been compiled and released to the general public before now, but those who have been fortunate enough to hear about this medicine and use it have found that it can produce often astounding healing even when all other therapies have failed.
This book tells of the doctors, medical researchers and the hundreds of other people who have used this extraordinary medicine throughout our century to cure a huge variety of common illnesses and combat even the most incurable diseases. This is the extraordinary untold story of a natural healing substance so remarkable that it can only be called our own perfect medicine.
My own experience with this little-known natural medicine began as a result of my search for an answer to many years of serious chronic illnesses that had begun very early in life. Like thousands of people today, I had developed chronic, degenerative disorders that couldn't be helped by conventional medicine and which threatened to destroy permanently my ability to work, function and simply enjoy life.
When I was young, I suffered through the same measles, mumps, chicken pox and colds that everyone else did. And like other children, I played hard, worked hard, and dreamed of the day when I would become a vigorous, emancipated teenager, just like everyone else. But, for me, that particular dream wasn't going to come true.
One beautiful July morning at the age of 12, I awoke with a start. Suddenly, surprised and frightened, I realised I was lying in a dark red pool of blood that was so large it had soaked through even the thick layers of my mattress. Trembling and weak, I pushed myself up out of bed and felt a horrible, wrenching pain tear through my abdomen.
My worried mother came running in answer to my screams, but, after assessing the situation, said there really wasn't much she could do about the pain of my first menstrual period. But what neither she nor I knew at the time was that what should have been a natural transition to adolescence and menstruating was, for me, going to become a waking nightmare that lasted almost 30 years.
At the onset of each one of my monthly menstrual periods I would invariably end up either in my doctor's office or at the emergency room of the hospital screaming with pain, bleeding copiously and passing huge clots of blood.
For several months after my 'periods from hell' began, my mother chauffeured me around the city from doctor to doctor with no success until our family doctor finally instituted a monthly regimen of painkillers such as Demerol or Darvon injections and then sent me home with a big, round bottle of full-strength prescription codeine with which I proceeded to dope myself senseless for the next eight to 10 days. This same cycle was repeated every month for almost 20 years.
Throughout adolescence, the simple everyday functions of getting up and going to school were an often monumental and utterly exhausting effort for me. Unlike the rest of my family and friends, I had marked periods of extreme exhaustion. I became extremely susceptible to colds and flu and felt bone-chillingly cold all the time-even in the warmest summer weather.
By the age of 14, the effort of combating severe chronic pain and fatigue while trying to keep up normal activities became impossible. I collapsed and had to be hospitalised and removed from school for several months. But even after a huge battery of medical tests and innumerable visits with doctors and specialists, no one was able to diagnose what was causing my problems.
After many weeks I returned to school and struggled through the high-school years with the aid of generous amounts of codeine and other strong painkillers that my doctor willingly prescribed. But by the time I left home for college, the symptoms of bleeding, exhaustion, pain and digestive problems became so bad that I often was unable even to leave my room or take part in daily activities.
I kept up the Demerol injections and codeine for many years and added to my regimen several other new painkillers and drugs which had been developed for menstrual problems. But the problems continued unabated, and in the ensuing years I developed myriad other serious health problems.
During the years from age 18 to 30 I was diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease or ileitis (a chronic, painful inflammation of the colon), chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), Hashimoto's disease (a disorder of the thyroid gland) and mononucleosis.
I had severe chronic kidney infections, two miscarriages, chronic cystitis, severe candida and external yeast infections along with marked adrenal insufficiency and serious chronic ear and sinus infections for which I was prescribed antibiotics on an ongoing basis for several years. Food and chemical allergies also became a big problem, and even though I ate almost nothing because of my extreme food allergies, I actually kept gaining weight, which only added to the discomfort of all the other health disorders with which I was dealing.
The bottles of drugs I had taken during this time could have filled a small landfill, but none of my illnesses or disorders had been resolved and, in fact, they were more debilitating than ever. It seemed as though I had become nothing more than a walking encyclopaedia of disease, and the worst part about the entire situation was that no matter how many failed drug therapies I tried, any visit to the doctor's office only resulted in another discouraging failure.
Another big problem was the drug side-effects. I felt like a ping-pong ball, bouncing from one drug to another as my doctors kept prescribing more and different drugs to counteract the side- effects of the ones I was already taking.
By the time I turned 30, the natural health movement was really picking up speed, and, desperate for any solution, I tried out the Adelle Davis nutrition regimen, megavitamin therapy, acupuncture, chiropractic care and every herbal preparation and drug-free natural health therapy that I could find.
Within two years, my chronic cystitis cleared up and the menstrual pain and bleeding markedly decreased. The ulcerative colitis also responded and the sinus infections disappeared. I felt that I was slowly and surely regaining strength and health and even beginning to experience a portion of the energy and vigour that 'normal' healthy people enjoy-and all without drugs.
When I conceived my son at 34 and made it through the first trimester without miscarrying, I felt as though I'd conquered the final health frontier. Unfortunately, in my burst of enthusiasm, I underestimated the impact of pregnancy on my understandably frail health, and the birth for which I had so carefully prepared was a near-fatal disaster requiring emergency surgery.
As it turned out, even despite all the illness and pain I'd gone through in the years before the birth, all of it seemed like child's play after I ran head-on into the serious complications of a difficult childbirth.
For months after the birth I hounded my gynaecologist, complaining of unremitting and severe abdominal cramps, cystitis and horribly painful menstrual periods. My natural health treatments would give temporary relief but, mystifyingly, didn't seem to have the same beneficial and lasting effects that they'd had before my pregnancy.
I underwent every conceivable medical test, each of which came back negative, but the problems just didn't go away. My doctor flinched every time I walked in the door and then sent me back out again with increasingly severe assurances that the pain was "unwarranted" and probably all in my head.
After alienating every doctor in town with my complaints, I finally gave up and decided to 'suffer in silence' until one hot summer day, almost 24 months after the birth, I suddenly fell screaming with pain on my living room floor in front of my terrified two- year-old. I literally had to crawl to the phone to call my husband. When he carried me, screeching, into my OB's office, the doctor clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "Now it can't be that bad, dear. We just checked you out a few months ago," he cajoled.
He gave me codeine and sent me home. Forty-eight hours later I was in the
operating room having emergency surgery for multiple-ruptured ovarian tumours.
A couple of days after the procedure, my doctor sauntered into my hospital room
with a conciliatory grin on his face. "Gee," he drawled apologetically, "we had
no idea anything like this was going to happen. Your ovary looked
horrible-engorged to the size of a grapefruit. No wonder you were hurting. Sorry
you had to go so long without help but, you know, the tests just never turned up
anything. And oh, by the way, the pathologist found a little endometriosis in
your right ovary."
Endometriosis is an incurable women's disease in which uterine tissue for some unknown reason detaches itself from the uterus, moves to other locations in the body and attaches itself to other organs or body tissue. This misplaced uterine tissue spontaneously bleeds in response to hormonal changes, causing internal bleeding, scarring and often excruciating pain that can destroy the woman's ability to live and function normally. This disease is not uncommon among women, but it is incurable, at least by conventional medical standards.
My "little" endometriosis turned into the monster that ate Tokyo. Three months after my doctor had 'successfully' operated, I was again sitting in the ultrasound room at the hospital, watching as several new endometrial tumours appeared on the monitor screen, accompanied by the usual excruciating pelvic pain, internal bleeding, constipation, haemorrhagic cystitis and acute exhaustion.
After the ultrasound I decided to contact a doctor who was recommended to me as an expert on endometriosis. He told me that he felt that my health problems had originally stemmed from undiagnosed severe endometriosis and an underactive thyroid which had probably been present since adolescence. He recommended an immediate hysterectomy, which I underwent. The day after the operation, the doctor visited me and compassionately whispered that I would "never have a problem with endometriosis again". But he was wrong.
Twenty months later, I had more tumours and another operation. Three months after that, the pain, tumours and internal bleeding reappeared and I was scheduled for what would by now have been my sixth surgical procedure in five years, which I refused to undergo.
Desperate and seriously debilitated, I flew to Mexico where I spent $15,000 on an intensive course of intravenous megavitamin and live-cell therapy at one of the alternative cancer clinics which had offered some hope for my case. For weeks, doctors poured nutrients and natural medicines into my veins and mouth. I watched as many of the cancer patients around me seemed to get better and better with the treatments. And I did, too-for about two months.
I spent my 40th birthday hopelessly sick and in bed, which was where I stayed that entire year. The drugs, operations and Mexican treatments had completely failed, and my usual herbs and homoeopathic remedies, although they gave temporary relief, seemed almost useless against the disease. And by now, even though I had health insurance, my husband and I had spent over $100,000 of our own money, and still I couldn't even get out of bed.
I had one last surgery which removed another large bleeding tumour. When I got home from the hospital I weighed 89 pounds and developed a post-surgical infection which required several courses of antibiotics. After taking the antibiotics, I developed an extremely severe case of candida (yeast infection). My hands and arms became covered with a horribly itchy fungal infection that nothing could relieve or cure, and I remained generally exhausted, bedridden and in intense pain.
Because of the surgeries, I was also experiencing early and severe menopausal symptoms: hot flushes, mood swings, water retention and depression. But because endometriosis is exacerbated by oestrogen, my doctor recommended that I refrain from taking oestrogen supplements which she said would have relieved the severe and very unpleasant symptoms.
Several months after the surgery, the all-too-familiar endometrial symptoms returned. My doctor assured me that all was well, but when I asked for and received my surgical records from the hospital I found she had written that "all attempts to remove endometriosis will be done, but complete surgical care can rarely be guaranteed; the patient may require further therapy for endometriosis, medically or surgically". For my exhausted and bewildered husband and myself, this prognosis seemed like an insurmountable and final defeat.
I had one more heart-to-heart talk with a gynaecologist who told me, "Given the severity of your case, the reality is that you could be facing a lifetime of corrective surgery." Given the state of my health at the time, I couldn't envision that "lifetime" meant anything more for me than a few additional years of mind-numbing pain and misery before my body finally gave out.
After nearly a lifetime of illness, these last episodes in my late thirties and early forties seemed like the final blow, and in all honesty I felt that there was no way out and no hope in sight. No matter how many times I'd been assured by my doctors that drugs and surgery would cure the endometriosis and my other disorders and make it possible for me to live a normal life, the doctors had been proven wrong.
A few weeks later when I heard that one of my friends from the cancer clinic had died in his sleep, I felt sad for his family but happy for him because he was finally free of his pain and suffering. In many ways I felt that he was the lucky one and I almost wished that the same thing would happen to me. It seemed that death would have been a blessing, especially so that my family could be freed from the seemingly never-ending burden of my illness and be able to get on with their lives.
Sitting alone and discouraged one morning, I glanced up dismally from a book I was reading when my husband came into the room. "I've got something else we can try, honey," he chirped enthusiastically, and proceeded to describe his conversation with a woman who had cured herself of a serious and reportedly incurable kidney disorder by using an unusual therapy. "Whaaat!" I responded after he told me what the therapy was. "I don't think so," I said, and went back to reading my book.
But after several more days and many more horrible episodes of pain and drugs, my husband handed me a small book and said, "You've got to try this." I picked up the book and began to read.
The small, unpretentious-looking book was full of fascinating stories about people who had been cured of even the worst diseases with a seemingly strange and little-known natural therapy. The therapy seemed incredibly effective, yet I still felt reluctant to try it. But as I read further on in the book, the stories were so compelling and the therapy was so simple that suddenly it didn't seem strange or preposterous to me any more. And at this point in my now nearly futile existence, I knew I had absolutely nothing to lose by trying it-so I did.
From the first day I began the therapy, to my immense surprise I got almost instantaneous relief from my incurable constipation and fluid retention. Within a week, my severe abdominal and pelvic pain was unbelievably gone.
The chronic cystitis and yeast infections (internal and external) soon
disappeared, and food allergies, exhaustion and digestive problems all began to
heal.
After a few more months of the therapy I noticed that, amazingly, my colds, flu,
sore throats and viral symptoms, all of which had resurfaced and become chronic
after the surgeries, now rarely made an appearance. My hair, which had fallen
out in handfuls after my fifth surgery, became thick and lustrous, my weight
normalised and my energy and strength increased so markedly that I was even able
to work again.
Last summer I hiked four miles into the Grand Canyon. For the first time in many years I can swim and even comfortably ride horseback or on my mountain bike for hours at a time-all formerly unimaginable activities. Much to my own and my family's amazement, I am back at work. After 30 years of almost non-stop illness, I have a rich, full life again-and all because of an unbelievably simple and effective natural medicine that almost none of us even knows exists.
This natural therapy became, for me, a priceless gift of health, as it has for many others. It gave the fastest, most dramatic results of any natural or manmade medical treatment I have ever tried and was truly the miraculous happy ending to my long story of illness and failed medical treatments. By using this simple, natural medicine, along with other natural healing approaches such as homoeopathy, herbs, good nutrition and rest, I have been able to remain consistently disease-free and I feel better and stronger than I have ever felt in my life since that fateful day in July so many years ago.
And even though this natural medicine seemed so peculiar to me at first, I later discovered to my surprise that medical researchers have been intensively studying and using this medicinal substance for decades.
As a matter of fact, unknown to the vast majority of the public, this incredibly simple and wonderful natural treatment is a well-proven medical therapy that has been used extensively and successfully throughout the 20th century by doctors and researchers from many different branches of medicine all over the world and has been shown to be amazingly effective in treating a huge variety of illnesses.
It's time that all of us should know about this therapy and about the medical research findings on this truly remarkable natural medicine-which is why I have written this book.
Up until this point, whenever anyone wrote or talked about using this substance for healing, they've been told that it's just an unproven folk remedy or old wives' tale.
But, as you'll discover in the following pages, this is completely untrue.
The truth is that doctors and medical researchers for years have scientifically
proven the tremendous effectiveness of this natural medicine. They just haven't
told us about it-for reasons which we'll discuss later on in the book.
This simple, natural method may seem less glamorous than commercial drugs and
space-age surgical techniques because it's not glorified by the press or hyped
by sophisticated, sugar-coated advertising themes. But when all the manmade
medicines in the world can't help, people like myself have been eternally
grateful to find that nature has provided this safe, painless solution to even
seemingly incurable illnesses.
So what is this mystery miracle medicine and why don't any of us know anything about it? If the body really does produce such an amazing substance, and doctors and scientists have used it to heal people, where are the news reports, the accolades, the commercials, the media hype? You want to know the answer? Then prepare yourself by first opening your mind. Let go of your initial disbelief and preconceptions and get ready for the best-kept secret in medical history.
This extraordinary miracle medicine that numerous doctors, researchers and hundreds of people have used for healing is human urine.
Surprised? Now before you scream "I don't believe it!" consider this. Whether you know it or not, you've already re-used and reingested your urine-large amounts of it for a long period of time-and it's one of the reasons you're alive today.
As medical researchers have discovered:
"Urine is the main component of the amniotic fluid that bathes the human fetus.
"Normally the baby 'breathes' this urine-filled amniotic fluid into its lungs. If the urinary tract is blocked, the fetus does not produce the fluid, and, without it, the lungs do not develop."
(G. Kolata, "Surgery on Fetuses Reveals They Heal Without Scars", The New York Times, Medical Section, 16 August 1988)
This is a fact that probably none of you without a medical background know, but the reality is that urine is absolutely vital to your body's functioning, and the internal and external applications of urine have proven medical ramifications far beyond anything that we, the general public, can imagine.
What amazes people most when they first hear about the medical use of urine is that they've never heard of it before. To the vast majority of mankind, urine is nothing more than a somewhat repugnant 'waste' that the body has to excrete in order to function.
But as you'll discover, urine is not a waste product of the body but, rather, an extraordinarily valuable physiological substance that has been shown throughout the history of medical science right up until today to have profound medical uses that most of us know absolutely nothing about.
One of the first things we need to clear up is the common perception of urine. Urine is not what you think it is. As a matter of fact, you probably have no idea what urine is or how your body makes it.
In reality, urine is not, as most of us believe, the excess water from food and liquids that goes through the intestines and is ejected from the body. I know that we generally think of urine in just this way: you eat and drink, the intestines 'wring' out the good stuff in the food, and the urine is the leftover, dirty, waste water that your body doesn't want, so it should never, ever be reintroduced into the body in any form-right? Wrong.
No matter how popular a conception, this commonly shared scenario may be, it just isn't true. Urine is not made in your intestines. Urine is made in and by your kidneys. So what does this mean, and why should it change the way you feel about urine?
In layman's language, this is how and why urine is made in the body. When you eat, the food you ingest is eventually broken down in the stomach and intestines into extremely small molecules. These molecules are absorbed into tiny tubules in the intestinal wall and then pass through these tubes into the bloodstream.
The blood circulates throughout your body, carrying these food molecules and other nutrients along with critical immune-defence and regulating elements such as red and white blood cells, antibodies, plasma, microscopic proteins, hormones, enzymes, etc., which are all manufactured at different locations in the body. The blood continually distributes its load of life-sustaining elements throughout the body, nourishing every cell and protecting the body from disease.
As it flows through the body, this nutrient-filled blood passes through the liver where toxins are removed and later excreted from the body in the form of solid waste. Eventually, this purified, 'cleaned' blood makes its way to the kidneys.
When the blood enters the kidneys it is filtered through an immensely complex and intricate system of minute tubules, called nephron, through which the blood is literally 'squeezed' at high pressure. This filtering process removes excess amounts of water, salts and other elements in the blood that your body does not need at the time.
These excess elements are collected within the kidney in the form of a purified, sterile, watery solution called urine. Many of the constituents of this filtered watery solution, or urine, are then re-absorbed by the nephron and delivered back into the bloodstream. The remainder of the urine passes out of the kidneys into the bladder and is then excreted from the body.
So, you say, the body's gotten rid of this stuff for a reason-so why would we want to use it again? And here's the catch. The function of the kidneys is to keep the various elements in your blood balanced. The kidneys do not filter out important elements in the blood because those elements in themselves are toxic or poisonous or bad for the body, but simply because the body did not need that particular concentration of that element at the time it was excreted.
And medical researchers have discovered that many of the elements of the blood that are found in urine have enormous medicinal value, and when they are reintroduced into the body they boost the body's immune defences and stimulate healing in a way that nothing else does.
As medical research has revealed:
"One of the most important functions of the kidney is to excrete material and substances for which the body has no immediate need..." (A. H. Free, and H. M. Free, Urinalysis in Clinical and Laboratory Practice, CRC Press, Inc., USA, 1975, pp. 13-17)
For instance, the kidneys filter out water and sodium from the blood into the urine. These are both vital life-sustaining elements without which your body cannot function. But both elements could be lethal if there were too much water or sodium in your blood.
Now what about potassium, calcium and magnesium? These are familiar nutrients that we ingest in our food and vitamin pills every day, but they're also in your urine. These nutritional elements are extremely valuable substances to the body, certainly not toxic, and yet the kidney excretes these elements into the urine. Why? Because it's taking out the excess amounts of potassium, calcium, etc. that are not needed by your body at the time they are filtered out. Actually, it is this regulating process of the kidneys and the excretion of urine that allows us to eat and drink more than our bodies need at any one time.
"The principal function of the kidney is not excretion, but regulation... The kidney obviously conserves what we need, but, even more, permits us the freedom of excess. That is, it allows us to take in more than we need of many necessities-water and salt, for example-and excrete exactly what is not required." (Dr Stewart Cameron [Professor of Renal Medicine, Guy's Hospital, London], Kidney Disease: The Facts, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1986)
But this isn't the end of the story. Scientists have discovered that urine, because it is actually extracted from our blood, contains small amounts of almost all of the life-sustaining nutrients, proteins, hormones, antibodies and immunising agents that our blood contains.
"Urine can be regarded as one of the most complex of all body fluids. It contains practically all of the constituents found in the blood."
(A. H. Free and H. M. Free, Urinalysis in Clinical and Laboratory Practice, CRC Press, Inc., USA, 1975, pp. 13-17)
Many medical researchers, unlike most of us, know that far from being a dirty body-waste, fresh, normal urine is actually sterile and is an extraordinary combination of some of the most vital and medically important substances known to man. Now this fact may be unknown to the vast majority of the public today, it is nothing new to modern medicine.
To us, the public, urine seems like an undesirable waste product of the body, but to the medical research community and the drug industry it's been considered to be liquid gold. Don't believe it? Read this:
"Utica, Michigan - Realising it is flushing potential profits down the drain, an enterprising young company has come up with a way to trap medically powerful proteins from urine. Enzymes of America has designed a special filter that collects important urine proteins, and these filters have been installed in all of the men's urinals in the 10,000 portable outhouses owned by the Porta-John company, a subsidiary of Enzymes of America.
"Urine is known to contain minute amounts of proteins made by the body, including medically important ones such as growth hormone and insulin. There is a $500-million-a-year market for these kinds of urine ingredients.
"This summer, Enzymes of America plans to market its first major urine product called urokinase, an enzyme that dissolves blood clots and is used to treat victims of heart attacks. The company has contracts to supply the urine enzyme to Sandoz, Merrell Dow and other major pharmaceutical companies. Ironically, this enterprise evolved from Porta-John's attempt to get rid of urine proteins-a major source of odour in portable toilets.
"When the president of Porta-John began consulting with scientists about a urine filtration system, one told him he was sitting on a gold mine.
"The idea of recycling urine is not new, however. 'We thought about this,' says 26 Whitcome of Amgen, a Los Angeles biotechnology firm, 'but realised we'd need thousands and thousands of litres of urine.'
"Porta-John and Enzymes of America solved that problem. The 14 million gallons flowing annually into Porta-John's privies contain about four-and-a-half pounds of urokinase alone. That's enough to unclog 260,000 coronary arteries."
("Now Urine Business", Hippocrates magazine, May/June 1988)
But urokinase isn't the only drug derived from urine that, unknown to us, has been a financial boon to the pharmaceutical industry.
In August of 1993, Forbes magazine printed an article about Fabio Bertarelli who owns the world's largest fertility drug-producing company, the Ares-Serono Group, based in Geneva, whose most important product is the drug Pergonal which increases the chances of conception. Guess what Pergonal is made from?
"To make Pergonal, Ares-Serono collects urine samples from 110,000 postmenopausal women volunteers in Italy, Spain, Brazil and Argentina. From 26 collection centres, the urine is sent to Rome where Ares-Serono technicians then isolate the ovulation-enhancing hormone." (N. Munk, "The Child is the Father of the Man", Forbes Magazine, 16 August 1993)
Ares-Serono earned a reported $855 million in sales in 1992, and people pay up to $1,400 per month for this urine extract.
Obviously, most of us are operating under a gross misconception when we
wrinkle our nose at the thought of using urine in medicine.
Urea, the principal organic solid in urine, has long been considered to be a
'waste product' of the body. It's even been considered to be dangerous or
poisonous, but this, too, is completely untrue.
Like any other substance in the body, too much urea can be harmful, but urea in and of itself is enormously valuable and indispensable to body functioning. Not only does urea provide invaluable nitrogen to the body, but research has shown that urea actually aids in the synthesis of protein, or, in other words, it helps our bodies use protein more efficiently. Urea has also been proven to be an extraordinary antibacterial and antiviral agent and is one of the best natural diuretics ever discovered.
Urea was discovered and isolated as long ago as 1773 and is currently marketed in a variety of different drug forms.
These are a few more examples of commercial medical applications of urine and urea in use today:
Another urine-related product ingredient is carbamide. Carbamide is the chemical name for synthesised urea. Where do you find carbamide? In places you'd never thought of, such as in products like Murine Ear Drops and Murine Ear Wax Removal System which contain carbamide peroxide, a combination of synthetic urea and hydrogen peroxide.
Medical researchers have also proven that urea is one of the best and only medically proven, effective skin moisturisers in the world. In many years of laboratory studies, researchers discovered that, unlike just about all other types of oil-based moisturisers that simply sit on the top layers of the skin and do nothing to improve water retention within skin cells (which gives skin its elasticity and wrinkle-free appearance), urea actually increases the water-binding capacity of the skin by opening skin layers for hydrogen bonding, which then attracts moisture to dry skin cells.
This is a remarkable fact considering that women spend billions of dollars a year on outrageously expensive skin moisturisers whose ingredients, even in tightly controlled double-blind comparison tests, don't even come close to hydrating dry skin as well as simple, inexpensive urea.
So, as surprising as it seems, urine and urea do have an amazing, voluminous history in both traditional and modern medicine.
An article, titled "Autouro- therapy", published in the New York State Journal of Medicine (vol. 80, no. 7, June 1980), written by Dr John R. Herman, Clinical Professor of Urology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, points out the general misconceptions regarding urine and its medical use:
"Autouropathy (urine therapy) did flourish in many parts of the world and it continues to flourish today... There is, unknown to most of us, a wide usage of uropathy and a great volume of knowledge available showing the multitudinous advantages of this modality...
"Urine is only a derivative of the blood... If the blood should not be considered 'unclean', then the urine also should not be so considered. Normally excreted, urine is a fluid of tremendous variations of composition...
"...Actually, the listed constituents of human urine can be carefully checked and no items not found in human diet are found in it. Percentages differ, of course, but urinary constituents are valuable to human metabolism..."
Look up urea in a medical dictionary. In Mosby's Medical and Nursing Dictionary, urea is defined not as a useless body waste but as a systemic diuretic and topical skin treatment. It's also prescribed to reduce excess fluid pressure on the brain and eyes.
Uric acid, another ingredient of urine, is normally thought of as an undesirable waste product of the body that causes gout. But even uric acid has recently been found to have tremendous health-promotion and medical implications.
Medical researchers at the University of California at Berkeley reported in 1982 that they have discovered that:
"Uric acid could be a defence against cancer and ageing.
"It also destroys body-damaging chemicals, called free radicals, that are present in food, water and air and are considered to be a cause of cancer and breakdowns in immune function.
"Uric acid could be one of the things that enables human beings to live so much longer than other mammals."
(O. Davies, "Youthful Uric Acid", Omni magazine, October 1982)
Urine is a critically important body fluid that has fascinated medical science throughout the centuries. Medical scientists study urine with tremendous intent because, unlike the public, they know that it contains innumerable vital body nutrients and thousands of natural elements that control and regulate every function of the body.
So, whether we know it or not, urine does have an extremely important and undisputed place in medicine-and not just as a diagnostic tool or as an ingredient of various synthetic drugs.
Your first reaction once you've read the convincing research demonstrating urine's often startling medical uses may be a willingness to use it as long as it's altered enough to make it unrecognisable. Many people might consider a synthetic or chemically altered form of urine-such as urokinase, the blood clot dissolver-as preferable to using it as a natural medicine.
But, there are many reasons for using urine in its natural form rather than as a synthetic drug or extract, not the least of which is the fact that there is no synthetic equivalent for individual urine, and never will be, owing to the tremendous complexity and uniqueness of each person's urine constituents.
Just as nature produces no two people who are exactly the same, there are also no two urine samples in the world that contain exactly the same components. Your own urine contains elements that are specific to your body alone and are medicinally valuable ingredients tailor-made to your own health disorders.
How can that be? It is because your urine contains hundreds of elements that are manufactured by your body to deal with your personal, specific health conditions. Your body is constantly producing a huge variety of antibodies, hormones, enzymes and other natural chemicals to regulate and control your body's functions and combat diseases that you may or may not know you have.
Modern research and clinical studies have proven that the thousands of critical body chemicals and nutrients that end up in your individual urine reflect your individual body functions, and, when re-utilised, act as natural vaccines, antibacterial, antiviral, anti-cancer agents, hormone balancers, allergy relievers, etc. (Talk about the perfect preventive care treatment!)
Many doctors have discovered and shown that it's extremely important to use our own natural urine in healing because extracts or synthetic drug forms of urine don't contain all of these individualised elements that address our personal, individual health needs.
Another reason that many doctors have emphasised the use of the natural form of urine is that it does not produce side-effects whereas synthetic drugs and therapies all produce side-effects, many of which are extremely dangerous.
As an example, the urine-extract drug called urokinase, which is used to dissolve dangerous blood clots, can cause serious abnormal bleeding as a side-effect; but natural urine itself, which contains measurable amounts of urokinase, has been used medicinally even in extremely large quantities without causing side-effects.
If you're not familiar with just how pervasive and extreme the risk of chemical drug-taking is, go to the library and look up a copy of The Physician's Desk Reference for Non-prescription Drugs (Medical Economics Data Productions Co., Inc., 1993, 14th ed.). This is the doctor's guide to every prescription and over-the-counter drug on the market, and every one of them is accompanied by a long list of ominous and frightening potential side-effects.
On the other hand, in almost 100 years of laboratory and clinical studies on
the use of natural urine and simple urea in medicine, extraordinary results have
been obtained, but no toxic or dangerous side-effects to the user have ever been
observed or reported by either researchers or patients using the therapy.
As we've learned, urea, which is the principal solid ingredient of urine, has
been synthesised and medically used with excellent results and with no
side-effects. But again, research has shown that whole urine can cure many
disorders that urea cannot, because urine contains thousands of therapeutic
agents such as important natural antibodies, enzymes and regulating hormones
that urea alone does not contain.
Urine therapy not only has dozens of successful research trials supporting it, but also thousands of success stories from people all over the world. As many people today have discovered, conventional medicine held no answers for either their chronic or acute illnesses and health disorders-but urine therapy did.
About the Author:
Martha Christy is a nutritional and natural health-care consultant, medical
research writer and editor, and author of the international bestseller, Learn
to Control Stress with the Stress Test. Her other books include
Reconstructing The Real You, Even Good Foods Can Be Bad For You
(Personalizing Your Nutrition), Balancing Your Body's pH, Simple
Diagnostic Tests You Can Do At Home, and Homeopathy and Your Own Perfect
Medicine.
Copies of Your Own Perfect Medicine, by Martha M. Christy, are available as follows: