Ok, sorry-in-advance, but we’re going to get down to some basic poop, here.

Literally.

We’re going to discuss intestinal function, plumbing (yours), diseases (like diverticulitis, crohn’s, irritable bowel, appendicitis, and even hemorrhoids, also constipation), and I have to mention all this in the first couple of sentences, or the search-engine bots don’t take me seriously.  This is a health-related post, so it should be taken seriously.  I’m smart and well-read and like to share, and I’m going to tell you things you might not know about your butt and what goes on behind/within it. Stuff you need to know, if you are a) human b) alive.

Anyway, about pooping:

There’s a good chance that you’ve been doing it all wrong, ever since you were potty-trained.

Me too.

Doing what wrong?

Pooping. Defecating. Shitting. Crapping. Unloading. Performing bowel movements. Practicing elimination.

And, hurting yourself in the process.

Me too.

There’s an obscure little website out there that I think deserves more attention. The guy behind it seems to be one of those earnest-but-practical sorts. He’s made some connections, figured out that there’s a problem, and figured out a stopgap solution.  You can keep reading this blog-post if you happen to like reading my posts - or if you’ve landed here exhausted, and inertia is keeping you from clicking away - but I think you should visit http://www.naturesplatform.com

The site and the presentation are a little rough around the edges, but I think the guy has a point.

Here’s my take. Human animals are built in such a fashion that we squat to eliminate waste and to give birth. The physical arrangements of our bodies, particularly the plumbing, is conducive to the squatting position.

If you don’t believe it, try crapping while standing erect. Yes, messy, too, but the main point is that your inner plumbing is not aligned when you are erect, so it’s physically difficult to evacuate your lower bowel from a standing position. There are quite practical reasons for this, if you give it only a few seconds of thought, so it’s not surprising that we evolved to dump while squatting. It’s also not surprising that we are well designed to squat when we’re not standing. Aeons passed between the time the first humans appeared, and the time the first chair appeared. So, our ancestors spent much of their working lives and most of their social lives in the squat position. Hunkered down. Huddled. Chatting, pounding maize, sewing hides, making arrows, passing the dope-pipe around the circle… er… did I say that out loud?

Everybody in the world, up until the 19th century, used either latrines or squat plumbing. The exceptions would have been royalty and other rich folk who could afford to have special facilities made for them.  It was only when the ceramic sit-down toilets became cheap and ubiquitous that the majority of people in the western world began to empty their bowels daily from an upright seated position… the “throne”. Naturally, since the British dominated half the world with their Empire, all the third-world people took it into their heads that throne-style/chair-style flush toilets had to be symbols of progress and superiority.

So, we’ve all been folding ourselves to only about 90-degrees, in order to sit-and-dump using our ceramic potties, for a bit over a century. And we’ve been paying for it. But, since the bad effects are slow to occur, we haven’t been making the connection. All this time, we should have been dropping a lot further, and folding ourselves more like 160(plus) degrees in the fully squatted position.

As noted on the www.naturesplatform.com website, the poor half of the world still uses squat toilets and, while they have a lot of health (and other) problems related to their poverty, they don’t have a variety of intestinal and other troubles that plague us “advanced” westerners with our throne-style water closets.

So, I’m saying you should call the nearest plumber or bathroom store and have a hole-in-the-floor squat toilet installed?  Yes, actually, I am.  But good luck with that. You won’t find anyone who carries them as a product, you won’t find a plumber with experience installing them, and you’d probably have an argument with your building-code people if you were silly enough to tell them about your plan.  Then, when you later wanted to sell your house . . . well, good luck again. 

So, if you are actually reading this far, and haven’t already gone away to the Nature’s Platform site, then I’ll let you know that the owner of that site has come up with a little folding platform that converts your regular porcelain throne into a squat toilet.

What he’s giving away is information and opinion, and what he’s selling is convenience… if you believe his information and opinion.  For the most part, I believed what he has to say (I summarized above), and I weighed the inconvenience of constructing my own platform against the convenience and small cost of buying one from Nature’s Platform… and went with convenience.

Yep. I’ve been using a Nature’s Platform for more than a year. It works.

What does it work FOR?  … you ask . . . and rightly so.

For me, it works to cure and prevent hemorrhoids.

Hey, don’t laugh!   That was worth more than the price of admission, right there. It cured that problem in a couple of weeks, and they’ve not been back.

As far as I’m concerned, if the Nature’s Platform claims needed any validation, they got a big boost in my mind, right there.   No, my mind is not in my butt, but when I was afflicted, my mind was certainly ON my butt more than I’d have wanted.

Sure, I felt a little silly setting up a platform around my toilet, and climbing up there. But since I’m unlikely to import a squat toilet fixture from Japan or India, this made all kinds of sense. And it works. So there!

If you’ve got hemorrhoids, diverticulitis, crohn’s disease, chronic appendicitis, or _any_ ailment that could remotely be attributed to - or aggravated by - unnecessary and excessive back-pressure in your internal plumbing, then I suggest that you invest. If you’re a guy or gal who’s handy with the tools, you could make yourself a platform. If you’re more ambitious, you could import and install an in-floor toilet. Or you could just buy a ready-made (some small assembly required — due to shipping — took a couple of minutes from the clear instructions) folding platform from Nature’s Platform.

Try it out.

If you don’t think it’s doing you any good, sell it or give it away.  It ain’t gonna break the bank.

If I had any kids, I’d be insisting that they use the one that I’ve got.

What’s my connection to this product and the site?  I’m a happy customer. If I eventually get my own website going, I’ll see if I can get some kind of click-through affiliate arrangement and maybe make a few bucks. It wouldn’t be much, though. I can’t see that the guy’s making a lot of profit from this product, and the volume is never going to be very high. If you’re even thinking of visiting, having read this far, that puts you in the minority.   For now anyway (January 2009) he’s getting a tiny bit of free advertising from me.

Once again, the only unquestionably true claim for the product is the one about hemorrhoids. I can vouch for that one.  But if you’ve got ‘em, you know that a product that painlessly gets rid of them AND gets rid of the cause (so they never come back) is worth the small cost (and a little bit of embarrassment) right there.

For the rest, well, the other disease/dysfunction associations are extremely plausible for the same functional and hydraulic reasons that the hemorrhoid connection makes sense.  Everything below my stomach works more smoothly than before, but I can’t make any claims about diverticulitis, because I wasn’t diagnosed - came close, at a doctor visit two years ago, but didn’t follow through since having the Nature’s Platform. Or, as I like to call it, my “Squat Rack”.

It spends most of its time, folded, leaning against a wall in my upstairs hall bathroom. It takes just over four seconds to set up, and about the same to take down and put aside, when I’m done.

DRAWBACKS!

The drawbacks that I’ve observed stem mainly from the fact that this is a stopgap measure, for those of us who cannot readily obtain and install a real squat toilet.

1) Splashing.  Because you are squatting on the platform over your open toilet, you are hanging out a bit higher than if your butt was nestled solidly on the regular toilet seat. So when anything falls in, it’s falling from a slightly greater height, and tends to make a slightly greater (higher) splash. It’s a little annoying sometimes. You do clean your toilets regularly and frequently, don’t you? Good. So it’s not that much of a problem.

2) Getting up and down. This thing IS a platform, with its standing-on surface just above the rim of your toilet. You need to be able to step up there, get your feet planted on either side of the opening, and squat down. I have no problem at all with this. But then, even for an overweight 50-something-year-old, I’m fairly agile. Even more important, I’m not wealthy.  :-)  So, my hall washroom is a narrow affair, with barely more than a foot (30cm) to my left, before there’s a wall, and not much more than that to my right, before there’s the edge of my bathtub. This means that I have the (wide) edge of my tub to use as a step-up, and all kinds of supporting surfaces to lean on, if I wobble. So, as I say, I never have any problem at all mounting the platform, using it, and dismounting.  Your situation might be different. If you have a palatial bathroom, your toilet might be quite far from the nearest support. You might need to employ a little step-up stool, to get safely on and off the Platform. If you are even considering this, you are probably an older person who is less impressed by what other people think (so not going to let a little embarrassment deter you), so that’s good, but your balance and agility might not be what they once were (back in your socially conforming and easily embarrassed days).  Yes, youth IS wasted on the young, isn’t it?

WARNING: Nature’s Platform is a sturdy, easy-to-handle affair, but the framework is narrower than the foot platform (where your feet go). This means, that you must be very careful to NEVER place your feet near the outside edges of the platform. It’s OK while you’ve got two feet firmly planted, but if you then _lift_ one foot, to move it, or to attempt to step down, the other foot is now carrying all your weight, outside the supporting framework. This will easily flip the platform and you!  I’ve not had this happen, but I have placed my feet a little wide and noticed the wobble as I shifted my weight preparatory to … um… dismount. So I’m always careful. You wouldn’t kill yourself (he said hopefully - if not helpfully), but you could turn an ankle badly. Just take reasonable care, ok?

So, here’s that URL again. He’ll provide you with more supporting info, as well as the pictures and arrows. My butt is practical and unpretentious, and my butt endorses Nature’s Platform.  It’s well engineered and well constructed. It’ll save you some pain and worse. Think of all the money you’ll save on laxatives. Now go.

http://www.naturesplatform.com

Come back soon. I’ll have more to say about something else.

That’s the way I see it, anyway.

Copyright 2009.