Drink Your Own Pee? One Colorado Group Says it Has Good Health Benefits

A group of people in Colorado are convinced that drinking their own urine and using it to treat skin conditions is beneficial to their health and well-being.

The Urine Therapy of Colorado meetup Group meets once a month in the Downtown Boulder Public Library for about an hour and a half to listen to a presentation and then hold a question-and-answer session to discuss urine-drinking benefits.

Group member Christopher Macor told NBC 9 that he has used his own urine for eczema on his hands when creams and ointments were not available. He said the practice known as Shivambhu goes back 4,000 years.

"It's the fluid of your body that's being given to you," Macor said.

The Shivambhu website calls it "The Golden Age of Well-Being."

Indira Bhatt Gupta, another group member, said she has used her own urine since 1983 as a topical treatment and a way to cure other ailments.

"In the morning that is the first thing I do," Gupta said. "Let some part go, take the middle part, put it in my eyes, put it in my face, and just have some Chai in the morning."

Therese Nicol usually just soaked her feet in urine, but she took it even farther after one meeting where other members encouraged her to at least take a sip.

"I know that I'll be drinking my urine when I get home," she told NBC 9. And when she tried it, she downed it in one gulp and said, "that was fine."

Though groups who believe in urine therapy exist all over the world, medical experts like Dr. Comilla Sasson insist urine "can be harmful" because it contains bacteria and is not sterile.

The website healthline.com says drinking urine goes back many millennia, and that its medical purposes is still practiced in some parts of the world.

"Reports dating back to ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt suggest that urine therapy has been used to treat everything from acne to cancer," it states in a healthline.com report that was reviewed by Dr. Debra Rose Wilson, who lists herbal and alternative medicine as her expertise. "There was a time when doctors tested for diabetes in urine by taste."

Books have been written about urine therapy, including "The Water of Life: A Treatise on Urine Therapy," by J.W. Armstrong, who argues that urine can cure all diseases, except those cause by trauma or "structural disorders."

According to WebMD.com, urine is comprised of water, salt and urea and uric acids, and it's made by the kidneys to filter toxins "and other bad stuff" from the blood system.

Drinking Urine Health Benefits
In this photograph taken on March 23, 2017, a cup containing bamboo, used to examine patients' urine, sits in a room at Tibetan medical practitioner Yeshi Dhonden's Tibetan Herbal Clinic in the Indian town of Dharamsala. Before dawn in the Indian Himalayas, scores of patients clutching small vials of urine queue patiently to see Yeshi Dhonden, a Tibetan monk who became a legend as personal healer to the Dalai Lama. Tibetan medicine, known as Sowa-Rigpa, draws on centuries-old techniques such as blood-letting, cupping, and moxibustion -- burning herbs on energy points of the body -- to try to heal ailments. Photo by PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images