As long as you aren't leaving it there (like stopping the shower and THEN pissing so it doesn't get rinsed out), there really shouldn't be an issue. Though I'm no expert on plumbing (quite the opposite in fact now that I think about it, it's one of the few things I don't know at least some random trivia about) so I guess it might be deleterious to your pipes. **heads off to Google to do some research because I'm now curious**
So the unanswered question: Is it still better to wash out an open wound with urine than it is to use untreated lake or creek water in an emergency situation?
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS VIDEO! Multiple times, I've had UTI's that came back positive on a dipstick but negative in the culture. They always told me to stop the antibiotics after the culture came back- yet if I finished the antibiotics my symptoms would go away!
Bottled/city water? Why make the distinction? It's basically the same thing, only you're unnecessarily paying extra for a name with bottled. Anyone with proper taste buds knows that.
This was really interesting. Because I've seen it so many films/series now, and I've always though it sounded odd that urine would be sterile. Also, I didn't know that there are so many types of bacteria you just can't grow in labs.
As I understand it, peeing on a jellyfish sting has nothing to do with pee being sterile, but because it contains chemical compounds that interact with the sting to reduce pain. Just sayin.
But not all are bad! It's definitely good to shower, but it'd be terrible to kill all bacteria on you. They're essential to digestion, produce many enzymes and nutrients your body can't make, and colonies of harmless bacteria don't let other (possibly bad) bacteria grow on you, making a kind of "shield". Do a bit of research or read an article on the matter.
Did you know no food or drink is sterile? Did you know tap from the faucet is not only not sterile it contains hundreds more toxins than urine? Wake up!
That ending was funny! "And if you happen to skin your knee in the woods... Wash it with soap and Water... Not with pee." This just made laugh. Keep going Scishow, make me smarter and happy.
Once? No. Repeatedly? Most definitely. There's a reason your body wastes all that water: to get rid of all sorts of crud you don't want inside you. Drinking your urine once doesn't pose any problems, because the toxins you ingest are toxins (by definition) your body can filter out of your blood.
Ew, do y'all remember the "my strange addiction" ep where the woman had skin cancer that was successfully, by her claims, treated by her heavy consumption of her own urine? I really hope TLC be trollin', but I'm afraid she was dead serious. She even would piss in an egg cup, and then hold her eyes open in it! She even would AGE HER PEE, claiming the "darker, the better!" Why, WHY WHYYYYYYY? I am still messed up in the head from that.
alex plowman Urea in concentrations in urine is actually not that toxic. If it were full on ammonia it would be but not as is and assuming you follow it shortly with some water in some way it's basically harmless even in cases where it might otherwise be harmful. Also, many vitamins and minerals are water soluble (as opposed to fat soluble ones which stick around) and exit via urine when you're in excess so claiming it's an evacuation of toxins in general is rather untrue as a whole.
"Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? No, but I do, because it's sterile and I like the taste." Rip Torn's character in Dodgeball couldn't have lied to me. It's just. Not. Possible.
I feel sad for the beautifully-bound and illustrated set of encyclopedias on Science we had during the '60's, volume by volume rendered obsolete by what we know today. The writers were so fervently sincere and sure of themselves.
Ugh, heard this shit so much when I was hiking the AT. Also, it's important to note that even if urine were sterile that doesn't necessarily mean it can be used to sterilize other things.
It should be a no-brainer that soap and water is much better than urine for washing a wound. The extant question is if no clean water is available, then is urine better than *nothing* for washing a wound?
The technique used to identify the bacteria is probably 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing. You take a sample and basically transcribe all 16S ribosomal RNA into DNA sequences with reverse transcriptase (RNA -> DNA enzyme) and amplify them with Polymerase Chain Reactions and sequence all the things you collected. This sampling of these rather random pieces of RNA is called metagenomics. The more you know...
For the case where I gash my knee open in the woods, I guess the question isn't "is urine sterile?" but "Is urine more sterile than the water found in a nearby lake or swamp?"
1389AD I had no time to prepare, besides I was blindfolded and dumped in the woods with nothing but my cloths. They took away my granola bars so I had to eat tree bark and moss. That is when I cut my knee open, kneeling while collecting moss.
Well, generations of experience can't lie. Even if the urine is not sterile, it's still the best thing to wash your wounds in the field, far ahead of saliva and some open water sources you may come by. Even tap water will be dirtier in most of the countries. And you don't often just happen to have some alcohol iodine solution or chlorhexidine with you when you go on a picnic or something.
LegoGirl1990 I usually bring bottled water with me, but problem is that here, in my country, we go out of city bounds for a picnic. So what if it was a very hot day, i've drank all the water i had, and just as we are packing up, i fall and slash my calf on a piece of wood, complete with a stream of blood and getting some litter into the wound? The only thing i can do is to take some cloth, piss on it and clean the wound with it, then apply a bandage. If i'll leave the wound untreated, i will probably already have local sepsis. P.S. It would be nice to have a car in order to bring medkit with me, but when you're towing everything on your two, you try and save as much weight as possible. So i usually leave these huge glass bottles of antiseptics at home. P.P.S. I've never got in this kind of situation, but knowing what you can do doesn't hurt.
LegoGirl1990 "I better risk dying from blood sepsis than wash the wound with my own pee". How smart. As for wet wipes - in my country they are so bad that they dry out in an hour after you open the pack and close it again. And who knows what pile of shit they use to make it wet, but it's certainly not disinfectants.
***** First of all, we still bleed people when they have severe case of high blood pressure, it's just controlled. We even use leeches for that. Dude, if people do something that works - it works, despite it being "mainstream" and seemingly silly.
***** No need to test this one though. Urine is certainly cleaner than any water you can find in the wild, so if you don't have the means to wash your wound - urine is fine too.
And when you consider there are 10 times more cells of bacteria than there are of you making up "you" (adding up to be about 1 to 3% of your actual weight) it makes even less sense.
A surprising amount of those bacteria are beneficial in one way or another, though. Especially in your digestive system. They help break down your food and produce useful vitamins and enzymes that the human body cannot produce on its own. To give you an indication of the size of those colonies, roughly 30% of your poop consists of dead bacteria. Harmless bacteria on your skin also compete with each other as well as with new intruders, making it harder for harmful bacteria to get a foothold. It's of course in no way a perfect barrier, but it does help.
As a Lab technician, you look for greater than 10k colonies to be considered clinically significant. This is the general standard operating procedure anyways. But he is correct that mostly it's considered negative if you only have a few colonies.
But isn't most water from households (used for cleaning scrapes) also contaminated by a certain degree? How significant and dangerous is the average bacterium living in your bladder?
agreed.. certainly good on a jellyfish sting in a pinch.. for the immune system that's nothing .. and generally not good for our immune systems trying to be sterile. They need something to work with!
Shit I've never once washed my hands after going to the bathroom even if I peed on my hands. And I'd even not care when I'm going on an interview or eating at a restaurant.
Washing your hands after going to the bathroom is a good habit to have, regardless of getting rid of pee. Washing your hands often helps (a huge amount) to prevent the spread of disease. Washing your hands after using the bathroom is convenient, the sink is right there!
I would like to note that, from personal experience, peeing on a jellyfish sting makes it sting less. I don't care whether it's sterile or not, it works.
that depends on the jellyfish, seriously though, alcohol could help as well, but not all jellyfish poison works the same way and sometimes it makes it worse, most of the time it helps though.
Mild acid helps alleviate jellyfish stings. Vinegar is recommended, even mustard (which contains vinegar). I believe alcohol is no longer considered useful, but I don't recall. One assumes the uric acid in your pee is what helps.
Actually we learned that urine is supposed to be sterile when it's produced, but the bladder is considered an infection hazard even by our own body. That's why there's a nifty little "pee-lock" in place between your kidneys (Which are nice and spongey and full of blood vessels and open spaces where bacteria would love to grow and cause serious issues) and the bladder.
How about saliva? I've been told saliva can speed up healing of small cuts and grazes, and little cuts etc inside the mouth heal pretty quickly. Science please!
The Sea Urchin thing I've always heard is ONLY in the event that the sea urchin itself has embedded in your foot and has a tendency to dig in. The acid kills it so it doesn't make the wound worse. I've also heard for the spines if they break off as it will do the same digging. I've heard this is a desperation move, as the surf shop I heard of had vinegar on hand to do the same thing without the ick. So, take that with a grain of salt.
Here's another argument for why one shouldn't wash a wound with urine: Urine comes out warm, bacteria likes warm liquid. So when you have a warm, open wound, it's easier to gain infection.
Blood coagulates and keeps the air away. Warm urine washes off the blood and leave in a layer for germs to infest. Then white cells has to fight away things that grew in the time when urine was in effect, in order to coagulate properly.
So if what you say is true, then we shouldn't wash it off with water either because that washes the blood away. The problem is the contaminants that enter the wound at the time of it's creation, you wash those away so your body doesn't need to fight as much, THEN you allow it to heal. (and that water might be warm too)
I work in a veterinary laboratory where they do blood & urine analysis and one thing I can say for sure is that the way humans usually have their urine collected doesn't lend itself to sterility to begin with. At our lab, peeing in a cup is called free-catch and you can end up with a lot of extra crap in there just from exposure to the air and your general environment, sometimes the tech looking at it can even tell that it was free-catch before even seeing the collection method on the computer. The most optimal ways of collection are catheterization(less exposure to outside elements but significantly less convenient) and cystocentesis where a needle goes directly through the skin and the outside wall of the bladder and sucks it directly out of the bladder(convenient for vets and probably necessary for any living thing with a urethral obstruction). Unfortunately some veterinary technicians are extremely lazy or uneducated about what kind of storage tube to use for urine collection so rather than use a sterile non-additive tube, they will use one that was made for blood, which has a clot activator in it, which comes up looking almost exactly like bacteria which can get the technician in trouble if they don't pay close attention to it. Most of the time the urine is just looked at under a microscope for a certain amount of bacteria, crystals, sediment or other bad stuff and if the bacteria is over a certain threshold, then it gets sent out for either a culture or a gram stain to one of the larger labs. I wonder if human labs do this the same way or if everybody just gets a culture since it's usually payed for by insurance rather than out of pocket like most veterinary tests are.
actually nothing we ingest is classified as "sterile". our hands are rarely sterile when we handle food. water out of the tap is not sterile. so the whole conversation around "urine is not sterile" is idiotic. The question is, is urine toxic? and the answer is no.
However, washing a wound out is better with using your urine than, let's say, unfiltered water from a stream. The urine WILL wash away things like bugs and dirt, lowering the chance for a foreign infection. Even though soap and filtered water, rubbing alcohol (or it's drinkable counterpart), and hydrogen peroxide are the best methods for cleaning a wound, urine is a fairly useful thing to use for cleaning it just because it gets the bigger, more threatening things out. PS. The whole "piss on a jellyfish or urchin sting" only works because warmth helps neutralize the venom. Not disinfect. The best cure for a jellyfish sting/urchin sting is to immerse the affected area in warm, but not scalding water.
I actually never heard that pee was sterile and the fact people thought that bodily waste didn't have bacteria in it is surprising. I have heard of people drinking pee to hydrate themselves but treating injuries with it is a new one.
Supposedly peeing on a jellyfish sting is supposed to help with the pain, not necessarily sanitize the sting site. People in Hawaii swear by it. I've never heard of peeing on a sea urchin puncture.
I've never understood how people can think urine is sterile. My understanding is that it's your body's way of getting rid of all the bad stuff from your system. Drinking it would just put that stuff right back in your body.
so the question is, if I am in the woods without soap and water (or any antibiotic cream/liquid), and I get this big laceration with visible dirt in it, which one is safer: Don't put anything on it and just tie it up with a cloth, or use pee to first clean it and then tie it up? Which will create greater probability of an infection? I understand pee has bacteria. But isn't the bacteria in the dirt even worse? And pee also has ammonia and other toxins that would most likely kill may of the relatively more harmful bacteria from the dirt.
Honestly, if I saw that on TV, I wouldn't think pee is sterile, I would think it has bacteria, stuff that fights off infections. Now, I would know that most likely isn't the case, but at least would seem like it has a good idea for a story, but that's it. Just like anything on TV, stories can be fun, but are very likely just that
Even without considering that there might be bacteria in the urine, having passed it was obviously a bad idea to use it for anything. The urethra etc. can have bacteria so it's unlikely it leaves your body unaffected even if it were perfectly sterile before leaving.
Shortened answer: Your urine does have SOME bacteria, but there is still argument and research being done to confirm yes or no. Shorter answer: Most scientists think no. Really short answer: No
I've always assumed that people only condone urinating on a wound as a last resort in the absence of any clean water whatsoever. Sure washing it with soap and water is great, but if you're in a desperate situation where neither is available I would think using urine to 'wash' it out is better than leaving it to develop an infection.
It wouldn't by my first thought to pee on an open wound, but if I was in the middle of nowhere with limited clean water (e.g. enough water for drinking and no fresh water springs or streams anywhere) I would pee on it- it may not sterilise it, but if I needed to wash the wound out I don't see the problem. Oh and I've also heard that some of the compounds in pee can neutralise jellyfish stings, just like vinegar/ethanoic acid can... so if I was stung and had no first aid on hand I probably would too :P
I was watching an old program on TLC (when it actually had things to learn on it) a while ago called The Operation. While operating on a patient a surgeon was spilling urine into the patient's body cavity and explained that it was OK because it was sterile and would just be absorbed. That wasn't a survival show, it was a medical show and came out of the surgeon's mouth.
If you're going to pee on a wound that is because you don't have soap and water in availability! So if you are hurt or stung by said conditions are you recommending to leave it untreated rather than peeing on it?
Yes, soap and clean water are ideal, but they aren't always things you have around. Is peeing on a skinned knee better than leaving it dirty or washing it with water you haven't had a chance to boil?
Even if urine is sterile in your bladder, this doesn't mean it will be sterile once it gets out. Your urethra is not sterile, and those bacteria will end up in your urine on the way it gets out.
to show how science advances, during ww1, the medical field manual recommended urinating on dressings so they wouldn't stick to the wound causing more damage, and conversely to help seal around sucking chest wounds
Can you do a video explaining batteries, the charges, sizes, amperage, rechargables, a short bit of acid base, potatoes, conductivity, cores, resistors, and currents. You know just an expo of the things they tried to teach us elementary school and following that never approached the subject again.
"sterile" isn't the same as "safe" anyway. Urine was (is) used to bleach cloth and fix dyes because of the acid content. Granted, that's after you get rid of some of the water to concentrate it, but still... If it's drink pee or die, I suppose you're better off drinking pee, but I'd try really hard to avoid that situation...
And tan raw hides. I believe the Indians would collectively pee into a hollowed-out tree just for this purpose. (Or so I learned as a kid, and was very impressed...)
Sterilizing is only temporary at best, and may or may not be a good idea. Sterilize a wound and... microbes come back! It's inevitable, and possibly even helpful if the microbes are the right kind. Or, perhaps sterilizing the wound kills off benign microbes, and the first ones to arrive on the scene are nasty ones. Fact is, results are results. If applying something to a wound reliably prevents infection, then do it. I don't care if it's pee, or crushed Flintstones vitamins, or the eye fluid of a three legged badger. The important thing is: *Does it work?*
Does it make a difference that the studies he mentioned were all involving female subjects? I've always heard that men's urine was more sterile, because the route to the outside is more direct. I'm still not sure that I'd trust untreated water from a random stream to wash a cut, unless I had the ability to boil it first. If pee and that were my only two choices...
When people say "pee is sterile", I always assumed that was just shorthand for "it doesn't have enough stuff in it to harm you, unlike poop". I'm pretty sure nothing coming out of your body is sterile in the dictionary sense of the word...
I knew a guy in high school that didn't use soap accept for shampoo. What he did do was take baths and pee in the water. It's nasty, but he never smelled, wasn't weird(other than that) and got laid plenty. Thing is you would never be able to guess that he didn't use soap, wasn't dirty or oily, so i thought i would throw this out there.
