MCLC: People's Daily takes stand against urine consumption

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: People's Daily takes stand against urine consumption
*****************************************************************

Source: Sinosphere blog, NYT (6/27/14):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/peoples-daily-takes-firm-sta
nce-against-urine-consumption/

People’s Daily Takes Firm Stance Against Urine Consumption
By CHRIS BUCKLEY 

If imbibing urine is not your cup of tea, People’s Daily — the solemn
voice of the Chinese Communist Party — is with you on that one. On Friday,
the newspaper took time off from its usual encomiums to party leaders to
warn people against drinking their own pee.

“There is no clinical or medical basis for using urine over a long period
of time as a product for preventing and curing illness, or as a health
supplement,” an investigative report
<http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2014/0627/c83083-25208637.html> in the paper
said, citing squadrons of medical experts.

These days, the party’s main newspaper rarely takes on a problem without
finding a plotter behind the scenes. And so it was here. The report said
the dubious practice had been encouraged by the China Urine Therapy
Association <http://www.niaoliao.org/index.htm>, which it found plenty to
be displeased about.

The report alleged that the Hong Kong-registered association lacked the
right credentials to qualify as a nonprofit group. The sleuthing reporter
tracked down the website of the China Urine Therapy Association and found
grounds for suspicion there as well.

“After visiting the physical address for the website, it was found to be
in an old residential neighborhood of Nankai District in Tianjin,” a port
city near Beijing, the report said. “There was an old man inside, and he
had nothing to do with urine therapy.”

The contact phone numbers for the association on its website were defunct.

Yet to judge by the association’s website and recent Chinese news reports,
there is no lack of old men convinced that regularly drinking one’s own
urine is a big plus health-wise. Urine therapy, or urotherapy, has a long
history and numbers of adherents in many countries, although medical
experts say it has no detectable benefits. Try telling that to the Chinese
association.

The website says its “objective and task is to propagate our country’s
ancient culture of imbibing urine, integrating with modern science and
technology to put into practice ‘I drink my urine to heal my body’ and ‘I
drink my body to cure my disease,’ ” it says. “This is opening a door to
health that money cannot buy.”

The urine association belongs to an undergrowth of less-than-orthodox
medical movements and beliefs that persist in China, often citing roots in
ancient tradition, despite official skepticism and denigration.

People’s Daily may have been prompted to move against urine drinkers by a
recent burst of publicity for their cause. In news reports
<http://www.chinanews.com/shipin/2014/06-24/news448673.shtml> that spread
on the Internet in China, elderly Chinese men have boasted of the benefits
of the habit and demonstrated its pleasures in pictures that may cause
some readers to wince.

One man in his late 70s told a newspaper
<http://www.cqwb.com.cn/cqwb/html/2014-06/25/content_393436.htm> in the
southwestern city of Chongqing that the therapy took some getting used to,
but gulping down the liquid was not as unpleasant as many assumed. “At
least, it’s a lot better tasting than many bitter Chinese medicines,” he
Said.

But he recommended using a glass, not plastic cup, to preserve “the
authentic taste” of the liquid. For reasons that the report did not
explain, he insisted on using a false name.