A valuable natural resource

Via Undark's Meera Subramanian, a pretty funny paragraph about a topic I did not know about:

Gomutra is the name in Sanskrit. Distilled cow urine, especially from young white virgin cows, has a long history in the traditional Hindu system of medicine known as Ayurveda, or “science of life.” Other men had gathered around us and they began calling out the problems that this Ayurvedic cure-all could fix: AIDS, diabetes, liver and kidney cancer, skin problems, bad breath, fever in boys! Just a couple of drops in the morning — along with a pill, someone added — and you will get better. When I asked how they collected it, they all gestured to a red bucket sitting by the door, and I gathered that there was some peon whose job was to watch the cows attentively, bucket in hand, and sprint out to capture the magical therapeutic fluid before it seeped into the desert sand.

I have to confess that I don't have a lot of experience with Ayurvedic medicine, although I've seen the term in the alternative medicine aisle of grocery stores and the like.  It's interesting to me that most cultures seem to have natural products cures of some sort; their efficacy as proven by double-blind clinical trials seems to be lacking, though.