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The Surprisingly Useful Medicines Hiding in Pee
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The Surprisingly Useful Medicines Hiding in Pee

New Section

This section discusses the presence of medicines in urine and how it has been used for various treatments.

Medicines in Urine

  • About 95% of urine is water, while the remaining 5% contains urea, chloride, sodium, and trace amounts of useful substances.
  • Doctors used to extract penicillin from patients' urine during World War II due to a shortage of the drug.
  • Other medications also pass through the body via urine, but manufacturing them is generally cheaper and less unpleasant than extracting them from urine.
  • Hormones like FSH and LH were successfully extracted from urine for infertility treatment.
  • Estrogen, originally isolated from pregnant women's urine, is now synthetically produced for menopause treatment.
  • Stem cells have been extracted from urine for medical research purposes. Only a small percentage of cells in urine are stem cells, but they can be reprogrammed to study various diseases.

New Section

This section explores the use of stem cells derived from urine for medical purposes.

Urine-Derived Stem Cells

  • Urine-derived stem cells are easy to obtain without invasive procedures compared to other types of stem cells obtained from bone marrow or blood.
  • These stem cells can be used to rebuild damaged portions of the urinary tract and have potential applications in studying neurological and cardiac diseases when reprogrammed into different cell types.

New Section

This section addresses misconceptions about using urine as medicine.

Misconceptions about Urine as Medicine

  • While urine contains compounds, hormones, and cells that can be used medically, drinking urine or using it as a cure for cancer or acne is not supported by scientific evidence.
  • Urinotherapy is not an actual medical treatment and should not be practiced.

so no language conversion was required.

Video description

Your urine is mostly water, but hidden in there are trace amounts of some very useful stuff! Hosted by: Stefan Chin ---------- Support SciShow by becoming a patron on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scishow ---------- Dooblydoo thanks go to the following Patreon supporters: Kelly Landrum Jones, Sam Lutfi, Kevin Knupp, Nicholas Smith, D.A. Noe, alexander wadsworth, سلطا الخليفي, Piya Shedden, KatieMarie Magnone, Scott Satovsky Jr, Charles Southerland, Bader AlGhamdi, James Harshaw, Patrick Merrithew, Patrick D. Ashmore, Candy, Tim Curwick, charles george, Saul, Mark Terrio-Cameron, Viraansh Bhanushali, Kevin Bealer, Philippe von Bergen, Chris Peters, Justin Lentz ---------- Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet? Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scishow Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scishow Tumblr: http://scishow.tumblr.com Instagram: http://instagram.com/thescishow ---------- Sources: https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003425.htm http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10643389.2014.1000761 http://www.lib.niu.edu/2001/iht810139.html https://www.nature.com/articles/154765a0 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/bodyhorrors/2014/12/31/penicillin-urine/#.WlUHPaOZNE5 https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/drugs-we-pee-out-are-returning-to-us-in-our-salad-bowls-to-get-re-peed/ https://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcb135e/fsh-lh.html http://knowledgenuts.com/2015/05/04/doctors-once-recycled-penicillin-out-of-urine/ https://qz.com/710516/the-strange-story-of-a-fertility-drug-made-with-the-popes-blessing-and-gallons-of-nun-urine/ https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/ob-gyn/gynecology/menopause-blog/february-2016/the-history-of-estrogen.aspx https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352304214000063 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-8066-2_2 https://www.hindawi.com/journals/sci/2017/4378947/#B16 https://www.hindawi.com/journals/sci/2016/2452985/abs/ http://jaha.ahajournals.org/content/4/9/e002159.short https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6a4b/96c0d561bb4927561dfb04cbd634842fde1a.pdf https://gizmodo.com/why-you-definitely-shouldnt-drink-your-own-pee-1648474064 Images https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penicillin_Past,_Present_and_Future-_the_Development_and_Production_of_Penicillin,_England,_1943_D16959.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_embryonic_stem_cells.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gray1123.png