Burning Man Urine

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Burning Man

urine drinking??? shivambu

Sun, March 19, 2006 - 5:44 PM bystevie

did anyone hear about the prime minister of india curing himself of cancer bydrinking his own urine???? well when i heard this i thought id read up about it -(learnt about it on a yoga course i underwent in rishikesh india ) - it turns out thatshiva drank it before meditation - i thought id email Dr Karl+

about it - and this was the reply - thought id share it with anyone that wasinterested - can anyone else share any info on this topic????:-)sorry about the formatting its the way the email reply came to me:-)

URINE DRINKINGBOOKYoud probably have to be mighty thirsty to drink your own urine, but millions ofpeople do it every day. Recent research shows it might not be such a crazy idea -and this research could lead us to the jet lag pill.People have been drinking their own urine for thousands of years. A few Prime

Ministers of India, Morarji Desai and Mahatma Gandhi, did it every day.According to Paul Keating, Queen Beatrice of The Netherlands actually drank aglass of pig urine on Dutch TV, to Prove that Dutch pork was of the higheststandard.Some supporters of urine-drinking claim that it is mentioned in the Bible. Proverbs5: 15 says Drink thy waters of thine own cistern, while John 7: 38 says Out of hisbelly shall flow rivers of living waters.However, some old Indian documents are very definite about the benefits ofdrinking your own urine.

The ancient yogic text, Damara Tantra, refers to a technique called shivambukalpa vidhi, which means literally urine revitalising technique. In this text itsays a sensible man gets up early in the morning when three quarters of the nighthas passed (about 3 or 4 AM), faces east and passes urine. The initial andconcluding flow of urine is to be discarded. The intermediate flow is to beconsumed. This is the most suitable method. In other words, drink your own mid-stream urine, very early in the morning. They called this habit amaroli - and it was
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supposed to help them meditate.But other people claimed medical benefits from urine. As recently as 1863, thehabit of injecting urine was mentioned in a book called The Physiological Memoirsof Surgeon-General Hammond, U.S. Army. He recommended using a hypodermicneedle and syringe.Today in alternative medicine, the healing use of urine is called uropathy. It isclaimed to cure everything from cancer to AIDS. Its used in every formimaginable. Patients are supposed to drink it, squirt it into various body orifices touse it as an enema or a gargle or a douche, dribble it into their eyes and ears asdrops,. If theyre a little shy, they can start off with just sniffing urine. Certainlymany athletes claim that washing your feet with urine heals blisters very rapidly.Normally, your body makes about 1 ml of urine per minute - about a small glassfulevery hour. Urine is about 95% water and about 5% solids. These solids includevitamins, proteins, enzymes, salts, uric acid, prostaglandins, and a recently-

discovered hormone called melatonin.Melatonin is the probably the reason the ancient yogis drank their own urine.Melatonin is made by the pineal gland, which the French philosopher andmathematician Descartes called the seat of the soul.As a drug, melatonin has a wide range of effects. If you eat it or drink it or sniff it,you can get everything from mild sedation, pain relief, sleep, a feeling ofemotional balance, increased visual imagery, and feelings of elation right up toan alteration in your ability to estimate time. Melatonin is produced by the pinealgland only when your eyes are shut. In your blood, the levels of melatonin peaksaround 2 AM, but there are significant quantities made between midnight and 6AM.It turns out that beta blockers, a drug commonly given for high blood pressure,prevent this night time release of melatonin. This might explain why beta blockerssometimes cause nightmares.Now the yogic ritual is to get up at 4 AM, drink your own urine and then meditate.Any urine made after 2 AM is loaded with melatonin, and this melatonin mightrelieve some of the physical pain of sitting motionless and cross-legged for twohours. It would certainly make your meditation easier if you also had increasedvisual imagery, and feelings of elation. Also the melatonin helps to reset your body

clock, and it fools your body into thinking that it has had enough sleep. In fact,scientists are looking at using melatonin as a pill to protect you against jet lag, byre-setting your body clock.The yogic texts also say that the urine of children is superior to that of adults. Thepineal gland in children produces more melatonin, and this is why children sleeplonger than adults. The urine of children has much more melatonin than the urineof adults. The extra melatonin would help the meditation.


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The yogic texts also say that you should drink your own urine every day for over amonth before you get the full effect. Studies have shown that you need to takemelatonin for about a month to lock in your sleep cycles.So the ancient yogic texts were right. A glass of urine a day could keep the stressaway. Drinking your own urine could be very handy if you have a big projectcoming up, and need to burn the candle at both ends. If urine becomes reallyvaluable, maybe recycled lemonade will cost more than fresh lemonade.

PINEAL GLAND - BIOLOGICAL CLOCK

The pineal gland is a small white gland buried nearly in the centre of the brain. It isshaped like a tiny pinecone, is about 8 mm long, and weighs about the same as ahouse spider - about one tenth of a gram.Parts of the pineal gland turn to calcium quite early in life. Doctors who see this

calcium on X-rays have long called it brain sand. They found it useful as amarker of the mid-line on X-rays of the skull. Brain sand is found in 30% of peopleaged 10-20 years, and in 80% of people over 30 years old.During the day, the pineal gland turns tryptophan into serotonin. At night, itconverts the serotonin into melatonin - the chemical that helped the early yogismeditate. So the pineal gland turns information about light (and how many hoursof light there are each day) into the hormone, melatoninThe pineal gland is quite small in animals that live near the Equator - where thedays are always 12 hours long, and the timing for breeding is not so critical. Butnear the North and South Poles, the timing is more critical, and the pineal gland islarger. In the newborn elephant seal, the pineal gland takes up 50% of the brainweight!

THE HISTORY OF THE PINEAL GLAND

Practically all animals with backbones over the last 500 million years have had apineal gland. The pineal gland feeds information about the length of the day andthe season to the master clock elsewhere in the brain.In the tuatara, the primitive New Zealand lizard, the pineal gland sits just beneath

the skin on the skull. In some lizards the pineal gland is exposed to daylightthrough a clear window on the back of its head. Perhaps the pineal gland is thefamous third eye of the mystical East.Herophilus, in the fourth century BC, claimed that the pineal gland was a valvethat regulated the flow of thought out of little storage bins in the brain.Ren Descartes, around 1640, believed that the rational soul lived in the pinealgland. He claimed that information about events in the real world entered the eyes,


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and then passed by strings in the brain to the pineal gland. The pineal glandreacted by sending humours down hollow tubes to various muscles of the body.He was very close to the truth.In 1918, a Swedish anatomist, Nils Holmgren, found that some cells in the pinealgland of the frog and the dogfish were surprisingly similar to the light-detectingcells in the retina.In 1958, melatonin was isolated by Lerner and his colleagues at Yale University.The chemists took 4 years to extract the melatonin from the collected pineal glandsof 200,000 cattle.

MELATONIN - THE DRACULA HORMONE

Scientists call melatonin The Dracula Hormone because the blood levels aremuch higher at night. They also call it The Hormone of Darkness for the same

reason, and also because we know so little about it.Daytime blood levels of melatonin (in people of all ages) are 17-43 pmol/l.Nighttime levels depend on your age. They are around 1080 pmol/l in childrenaged 1-3 years, 520 pmol/l in children and adolescents 8-15 years old, and theygradually drop until they reach levels of about 86 pmol/l in adults aged 50-70years.Melatonin production is completely switched off by very bright light (about 2,500lux). Typical indoor lighting is around 250-500 lux. Outdoor brightness rangesfrom 10,000 lux (cloudy day in northern Europe) to 80,000 lux (sunny day near theEquator).

JET LAG AND MELATONIN

Jet lag is the disruption of your internal body clock. You want your breakfastporridge when everybody else wants dinner. About 15% of travellers never get jetlag, 15% will be bed-ridden by it, while 70% can get by, but dont feel great. Youneed about one day to reset your clock from the shock of crossing one time zone.So it will take you 12 days to recover from flying halfway around the world over12 time zones.

The standard advice depends on which way you are flying. If you are headingEAST over six or fewer time zones, expose yourself beforehand to natural morninglight for about 3-4 hours. But if youre planning to cover more than six timezones, avoid the morning light and get the midday light. If you are heading WESTover six or fewer time zones, expose yourself to natural afternoon light for about 3-4 hours. But if youre planning to cover more than six time zones, avoid theafternoon light and get the midday light.


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But this could all change when the melatonin pill becomes available. If you takemelatonin in the morning, it delays your body clock. If you take melatonin in theafternoon or early evening, it advances your body clock. So adjusting for jet lagcould be as easy as taking a pill at the right time!

URINE - CLEANER THAN SALIVA?

Most people think that urine is full of germs. Theyre wrong - urine has fewergerms than your mouth, or the water you get out of a tap.Normally, urine is sterile. This medical jargon means that there are nosignificant numbers of bacteria. If you were to take a few millilitres of urine, andadd some germ-free food-for-bacteria, no bacteria would grow. But if you wereunlucky to have a Urinary Tract Infection, then there would be bacteria in yoururine. These bacteria would grow in the presence of bacteria-food. A

microbiologist could recognise these bacteria, and test to find which antibioticswould kill them. Then your doctor would prescribe the most appropriate antibiotic.So while your urine might not seem very delicious or tasty to drink, at least it hasfewer bacteria than your own saliva.

URINE-DRINKING IN TAIWAN

About 200,000 Taiwanese drink their own urine every morning. This movementbegan when Chen Ching-chuan met an old war friend, after 14 years separation. Tohis surprise, his old friend had not aged. His friend said he had been drinking hisown urine - so Mr. Chen followed his example.Mr. Chen ran into trouble with the local police, when he recently had to apply for anew identification card. He looked 44 years old, not 64 - but luckily, a friend gavethe needed identification. The urine-drinking movement is now so popular that iteven runs a Urine Therapy Hot Line.

REFERENCES:

The Pineal Gland by Richard J. Wurtman and Julius Axelrod, Scientific

American, July 1965, pp 50-60

Grays Anatomy, by Roger Warwick & Peter L. Williams, Longman, 1973(35th edition), ISBN 0 443 01011 0, pp 372, 1371, 1373

Clinical Neuroanatomy for Medical Students by Richard S. Snell, 1980, Little,Brown & Company, ISBN 0-316-80213-1, pp 226-227


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The Body Book by David Bodanis, 1984, Little, Brown & Company, ISBN 0-316-10072-2, p 286

A Clockwork Gland by Bruce Fellman, Science 85, May, pp 76-81

The pineal: a gland that measures time? by Josephine Arendt, New Scientist,No. 1466, 25 July 1985, pp 36-39

A gland for all seasons by Andrew Loudon, New Scientist, No. 1466, 25 July1985, pp 40-43

Human Physiology by William F. Ganong, 1987, Appleton and Lange, pp 82, 387

The Body in Time by Kenneth John Rose, 1988, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 0-471-85762-9, pp 91-92

Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopaedia, 1989, Van Nostrand Reinhold, ISBN 0-442-31816-2, p 2224

Carbohydrates and Depression by Richard J. Wurtman and Judith J. Wurtman,Scientific American, January 1989, pp 50-57

Clear as Urine, New Scientist, No. 1718, 26 May 1990, p 10

The longest day: 14 1/2 hours of sunlight by Deborah Smith, Sydney MorningHerald, 22 December 1990, p 5

Light Dawns on the Body Clock by James Waterhouse, New Scientist, No.1792, 26 October 1991, pp 22-26

*****Melatonin Supplementation from Early Morning Auto-Urine Drinking,by M. H. Mills and T. A. Faunce, Medical Hypotheses (1991) 36, pp 195-199

*****A Glass of Urine a Day keeps the Stress Away by Gail Vines, NewScientist, No. 1810, 29 February 1992, p.14

More to Winter Blues by Marilyn Bitomsky, Medical Observer, 1st May 1992,p 24


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Handling the Drag of Jet Lag by Diana Simicevic, Sydney Morning Herald, 8October 1992, p 27

Brief Report: Melatonin-Related Hypogonadotropic Hypogodanism by ManuelPuig-Domingo et al, New England Journal of Medicine, Vol 327, No 19, 5November 1992, pp 1356-1359

*****Melatonin - the Hormone of Darkness by Robert D. Utiger, New EnglandJournal of Medicine, Vol 327, No 19, 5 November 1992, pp 1377-1379

***Golden virtues of a full-bodied brew, Australian Doctor Weekly, 27November 1992, p 51

Dracula pill resets our body clocks by Don Radcliffe, Medical Observer, 11

December 1992, p 21

This is hard to swallow, The Australian, 14 January 1993, p 9

Melba, The Australian, 15 January 1993, p 13

Karl S. Kruszelnicki 1993He was right. Nerves do run, via the optic nerve, from the retina to thesuprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN), which are a key circadian oscillator. From the SCNin the hypothalamus, nerves run to the reticular system, then to the spinal cord, andthence to the superior cervical ganglia. From there, adrenergic postganglionicsympathetic fibers (the conarian nerve) run to the pineal gland, travelling alongwith the glands blood supply (in the wall of the straight sinus).He was half right. The pineal gland does send out at least one humour,melatonin. It sends it into the blood stream, and also into the cerebrospinal fluid(CSF). In fact, the level in the CSF is much higher than the levels in the blood.

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