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By Andy Newman

June 7, 1999 | For a man on the 21st day of a urine-and-water fast, Tom Nichols seems awfully chipper. Nichols, a stocky, balding 45-year-old regular guy from Tennessee in a Coast Guard Academy windbreaker, is sitting in the restaurant adjoining a convention hall in a little German town, explaining in the smoothly reassuring tones of an airline pilot, which he is, that urine only tastes bad if you're not eating right.

"Once you do this, you have to take responsibility for what you put in your body," he says as I listen and pick at an asparagus salad. "If you're drinking a lot of coffee or alcohol, it can taste pretty bad, pretty strong." Otherwise, he says, smiling, "I've had worse beers."

His wife, Zhenya, a lithe, radiant ball of girlish energy from Siberia who is 37 but looks 10 years younger, adds that her biggest health problem is that her kidneys and bladder cannot keep up with her demand for urine.

"I don't make enough!" she gushes between slurps of vegetable soup. "I have to put some on my face and some on my hands. Then I need some to drink. And we like to save it up and take a bath in it. Sometimes my nose gets a little bit stuffy and I want to get some in my nose, or my mouth doesn't feel fresh or I have some plaque in my mouth and all you have to do is hold it in your mouth for a while."

I kept eating dinner throughout this discussion, though I did lay down my fork while Zhenya described the gruesome things that came out of her digestive tract during a month-long cleansing regimen of concentrated-urine enemas.

No one else at the table, though, batted an eyelash. This is because we were at the Second World Conference on Urine Therapy, held last month in Gersfeld, Germany. There, in a tiny resort two hours outside Frankfurt, the Nicholses and 250 other health enthusiasts -- several dozen with M.D. after their names -- from more than 40 countries spent four days debating, discussing and charting the future of one of the world's oldest but least respected healing arts.

Which is better for massages, the attendees wondered, fresh urine or the more potent 4-day-old pee? Does drinking it cure illnesses simply by killing germs or by activating immuno-sensor cells in the throat, or both? And when will the rest of the world get over its taboos and realize that each of us carries within our kidneys a customized apothecary stocked with the perfect blend of vitamins, enzymes, hormones and antibodies, all for free?

Not too soon, probably. The Western medical establishment still clings to the notion that urine is a waste product, albeit a sterile one, probably harmless in small doses but probably not in large ones, and that if the body really wanted the stuff that's in it, it wouldn't have excreted it in the first place.

But for the enlightened, urine is not merely a blend of water, urea, salt, ammonia and traces of hundreds of other organic and inorganic compounds. It is the Nectar of Life, an elixir and a balm that combines the all-purpose usefulness of baking soda with the mystique of holy water. Depending on whether it is drunk, snorted, injected or applied topically, it has been cited as a remedy for everything from AIDS to acne to varicose veins to vertigo. A squirt in the eye relieves glaucoma, drops in the ear can cure deafness, a urine douche banishes yeast infections.

"If you have any tumor or any trauma, it reduces pain," Jagdip Shah, a gynecologist from Bombay, said in the hallway outside the Amazon Hall (other rooms had been dubbed the Yangtze, the Mississippi and the Nile). "If you have ulcers, it helps in healing that wound. If you have constipation, dyspepsia, flatulence, then it relieves that also. If one is feeling weak, then by taking it one feels better."

No one knows how many tinkle drinkers there are, but the organizer of the conference, Coen van der Kroon, author of the book "The Golden Fountain," said their numbers are growing. The second conference attracted a far more multinational crowd than the first one in Goa, India, in 1996. The first conference drew 400 people, but most of them were from India, where urine therapy goes back millennia.

I was drawn to Gersfeld mostly by a reporter's natural need to investigate the seemingly implausible, partly out of a healthy curiosity about the human body (a couple of months before, I had tried to settle an argument by surveying all my friends on whether they washed their hands after defecating) and partly because there was something about urine therapy that seemed poetically right, as counterintuitive as it was.

The prevailing theory behind it -- and theories are all there are -- is that because your urine contains a snapshot of whatever is going on in your body, it is your own best personalized medicine. Traces of whatever is wrong with you get excreted in your urine, and when you reintroduce these compounds through the immune-system pathways of the gut and skin, the theory goes, they trigger the production of the antibodies your body needs to fight the illness. Kind of like self-vaccination.

Theories like this, of course, are tough to prove. Medical researchers have long used individual components of urine. The human-urine byproduct phenyl acetate is in the midst of a clinical trial to see if it attacks brain tumors. Trials are also under way with a controversial class of cancer drugs called antineoplastons, the original recipe for which required so much urine that their Houston inventor used to collect it in bulk from restaurant and jail urinals in Texas.

But a clinical trial of whole urine poses logistical problems. For one thing, what do you give the control group, Gatorade? For another, the very appeal of urine to a holistically minded therapist -- that it is never the same stream twice -- makes it inherently hard to study. "Science lives on the idea of repetition," Carmen Thomas, a German journalist, told the conference, "but urine cannot be repeated."

Next page | I grew brave and took a sip