Lots of people use natural remedies, but some villagers in China are taking that concept to the extreme. They’re trying to cure themselves with manure. Numerous residents of Xiangtan in Hunan Province have taken to consuming cow and goat excrement as a way to treat cancer and other conditions, the Global Times reported. They dry it out, grind it up and boil it to make a tea. Way Too Viral has more:
One 77-year-old woman said she’d drunk 9 kg of the stuff. A key requirement: It has to be fresh. The trend apparently started after a couple of people said they’d successfully treated cancer in this way. Although the villagers add sugar to the mix, you’d have to assume it would taste terrible. You’d be right. Writer Brent Crane traveled to the village of Jinshi and actually tried it. In an article for Vice, he explained that the taste of the sugar hit first.
“That was followed by the taste of poop, which you can imagine pretty easily — just stick your head in a toilet and inhale through your mouth,” he wrote. Crane noted that the village residents believe the manure takes on medicinal properties because of the local vegetation the animals eat. They believe the dung tea is effective against not only cancer, but also bone pain, skin conditions and gynecological problems, he wrote.
In a sense, whether the remedy works or not is a moot point in an isolated rural village. The residents largely lack access to modern medical care — that’s the case for about 100 million people in China — so they improvise with items that are available to them. Other folk remedies range from eating eggs boiled in urine to consuming live ants, Crane noted.
