Please do not inject urine into yourself.
We live in a world where advice like this is actually necessary.
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I call this newsletter Brian’s Bullshit-Free Zone® because it attempts to call out bullshit in pop culture. Well, I don’t find that exemplified better anywhere than this TikTok video by “biohacker” and broad-spectrum wooist Dave Asprey:
If you can’t see the video, or do not wish to otherwise sully yourself, he says:
What urine injection therapy is is you expose yourself to something you’re allergic to, whether you breathe it or you eat it; you wait several hours, at least four; and then you collect your pee in a sterile container. Then you pull the pee up into a big syringe, 10 mils; mix in some lidocaine so it doesn’t hurt; and inject it through a filter deep into your muscle. And you do this because your body makes immune molecules, IGG, that’s in urine; and you introduce those into your muscle; your body looks at those proteins and says “Oh, there’s protein in the muscle, they must be an infection,” so it makes antibodies to your own antibodies. That works, and I’ve seen some profound results in people from that; but drinking it, not so much.
And it’s not just this crackpot. Here’s a 35-year-old article from the Los Angeles Times about a doctor who lost his medical license (obviously) for administering exactly this same treatment. He described it as “a folk remedy that has been used for thousands of years” — though if you can find evidence that intramuscular injections were being performed thousands of years ago, I’ll be impressed.
Some people even inject urine to lose weight.
I now present to you the official “World’s Most Unnecessary Clickbaity Pitch to Get You to Buy a Subscription to Get Past the Paywall”: Why you should not inject urine into yourself.