With the right form of inducement, advertising or indoctrination, you can get people to do literally anything.

They’ll pay £800 for sunglasses worth £8 and wear fur-lined Ugg boots in heatwaves. You can make the entire western world read Fifty Shades of Grey, transforming this atrocious trash into the biggest selling book of all time. You can get people to blow themselves to pieces with suicide vests or fly planes into buildings. You can get parents to deny their children lifesaving blood transfusions and drugs. You can make communities administer poison to their kids and then take it themselves, so they can all happily die in a mass cult suicide.

Admittedly, some of these examples require a certain amount of religious brainwashing, but this isn’t the case with urine drinking. Yes, you can even get seemingly normal people to drink their own piss.

John W. Armstrong was the pioneer of Urine Therapy, as this ludicrous practise became known. He saw how his parents would treat bee and jellyfish stings with urine and decided to try drinking it for ailments such as measles and the common cold. Armstrong was a huge believer in the Bible (something which might not come as a surprise) and took one of the proverbs literally. 5: 15 - "Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well". Naturally, he assumed that God was telling him to drink his own piss and, during his next period of illness, he fasted, eating nothing and drinking only water and urine. Amazingly he survived and, in 1944, he published his book on this new ‘medicine’: The Water of Life: A treatise on urine therapy.

The book actually sold and readers began doing as he advocated, including the Prime Minister of India Morarji Desai. The PM claimed it worked wonders for him and, in 1978, publically stated that urine therapy was the perfect medical solution for the millions of Indians who couldn’t afford medical treatment. Plus, of course, if he could get the underprivileged masses drinking piss, he could spend his government budget on nuclear missiles and a space programme instead of health care. Everyone was a winner.

Various Indian gurus adopted the idea and worked it into their yoga teachings. Some homeopaths – the people who treat MS with tap water – also claimed it was wonderfully beneficial. Some Mexican cancer clinics sold the idea as a ‘therapy’ for cancer sufferers. It also took off in Cameroon until the Health Minister warned against it. "Given the risks of toxicity associated with ingesting urine", he said, "the health ministry advises against the consumption of urine and invites those who promote the practice to cease doing so or risk prosecution."

This might be a good point to mention that drinking your pee does no good whatsoever, something which, hopefully, the majority of people won’t need to be told. Urine-therapy is classed as an alternative medicine, but it’s as far away from medicine as you can get. Urine, as we all know, is a bodily by-product, secreted by the kidneys, that clears the detrimental crap out of the bloodstream. Nasa scientists researched it at length in the early seventies, with the idea that astronaut pee could be purified for drinking in space. They unanimously found that there was no benefit at all to be gained through drinking untreated urine, which shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise.

Many people still drink their own pee, and not just in mental institutions. The likes of Bear Grylls can be found doing it in emergencies, and the author J.D. Salinger supposedly practised this odd ‘medicinal’ habit, but perhaps the most famous urine guzzler was the gorgeous Oscar-nominated actress Sarah Miles. Sarah used to piss in a glass every night before retiring and drink it the moment she woke. She began to talk openly about this in television interviews and, bizarrely, we haven’t seen much of her on the screen since.

With the right form of inducement, advertising or indoctrination, you can get people to do literally anything.

All this, of course, is just my personal opinion, (backed up a little by science, reason and common sense). If anyone feels the urge to drink their own piss - or anyone else’s for that matter - please don’t be put off by this cynical blog.