A researcher from a teaching hospital in the Sudan presented a study of 30 patients with ascites -- an accumulation of serum in the abdominal cavity that causes distended stomachs -- that found that they responded slightly better to 150 ml of camel urine a day than to a standard medicine, the diuretic frusimide. And a Chinese pharmaceutical company reported that in a clinical study, its urine-derived cancer drug CDA-II cured 61 percent of patients, compared with a 30 percent cure rate for chemotherapy.

Up in my hotel room, I'd grown brave enough to begin my own research. Every morning, I rubbed a handful of urine into the right side of my face, looking to see if the skin was growing clearer and less prone to dryness and the occasional zit than the left side. With great force of will, and only after putting on the neat souvenir baseball cap I picked up (white, with slickly slanting purple capital letters: "I drink my own urine!") -- I peed in a cup and took a sip. It was a warm, salty, slightly viscous-feeling broth with notes of bitter vegetable. Not great -- worse than my worst beer, in fact, but only slightly gag-inducing. (Three weeks into both of these experiments, I have yet to see any results.)

I felt kind of weird, but it didn't seem like there was much to lose. John Wynhausen, a former chiropractor disbarred for practicing urine therapy, had said he had never heard of anyone who died from urine therapy, though he, like everyone else at the conference, does not recommended it for anyone on prescription drugs. His only mishap in eight years of experimentation came when he injected his dog with its own urine and the dog developed an abscess. "The vet asked what happened," Wynhausen said. "I said, 'Oh, the cat bit him.' I didn't need any more publicity."

Besides, I was heartened by the fact that everyone I spoke to said that their first reaction to the suggestion that they drink from their own Golden Fountain was one of disgust.

"When John told me there's something called urine therapy I was just appalled," Wynhausen's wife, Judith, said between lectures. "I was like, oh, yuck. I didn't even want to be in bed with him. But John kept getting healthier and healthier, and I kept getting colds, so I tried it. By the end of a week it didn't bother me any more and I was feeling euphoric."

Western doctors, it turns out, are particularly dubious about the immune-building argument. "The idea that there's some immune property in the urine is a little hard to understand, given that our gut is designed to break down all immunological substances," says James Dillard, M.D., a professor at Columbia University's medical school and author of "Alternative Medicine for Dummies" who also runs Oxford Health Plan's 3,000-provider alternative medicine program (he's also a chiropractor and an acupuncturist). "The idea that the kidneys would figure out what they need to get rid of but that we know better, that actually this is a therapeutic thing, that is extraordinarily arrogant."

Not all urine therapists see the stuff as a panacea. John Wynhausen, who lost his chiropractor's license in Nebraska after reporting in a newsletter that a patient had cured a year-old case of oral herpes after three days of gargling her urine, told the conference that while he still believed urine was a good overall tonic and an integral part of a balanced diet, it loses most of its curative powers unless it is injected, bypassing the immune system.

Wynhausen said that shooting 10 cc of urine into his muscle -- a technique pioneered by a German doctor, Johann Abele -- gives him season-long relief from the hay fever that has plagued him all his life. Hay fever, he explained, happens when the body overreacts to pollen and produces antibodies against it, and when these antibodies are excreted in the urine and then reintroduced via injection, they trigger the production of anti-antibodies that suppress the overreaction.

Dillard, when told of this theory, seemed intrigued and said he would love to see it clinically proven. Wynhausen said he doubted that would happen. "It would be easy to do a double-blind study on injection," he said. "The problem is that no institution would want to risk their credibility by doing it."

The relative lack of conclusive proof does little to dim the faith of those who have experienced the wonders of urine firsthand, though. Dr. Gunter Gilch, a German anesthesiologist and naturopath who saw the light after urine-drinking cured him of a 15-year bout with intestinal candidosis, said that people had every right to be skeptical -- he himself found much of the conference laughably nebulous -- "but I saw effects with myself and I saw effects with my patients. By empirical standards, it works."

"People are always looking for a mechanism," Wynhausen said. "I'll stake my reputation -- well, I have no reputation -- but I think there's a mechanism."

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