I’ve noticed more and more in public bathrooms that people skip the handwash and just take a squirt of hand sanitizer from wall dispensers on the way out. hand sanitizer is NOT effective against most things that come out of your ass. i cannot stress this enough. i’m begging y'all. please. please please please please please use the soap.
i’m out here immunosupressed fighting for my life to not get naturally selected while people around me touch a public toilet handles and walk back to their tables to immediately eat a burger
Thank you for bringing this up! Many hand sanitizers and household cleaners proudly claim to “Kill 99.99% of germs.”
In fact, this does not mean that the product kills 99.99% of all germs known to exist.
It means that, during product testing in a controlled environment, the product killed 99.99% of the germs it was specifically tested against. As you might imagine, Lysol isn’t testing its kitchen disinfectant spray against millions and millions of unique microbes.
In the U.S., labeling laws usually require that companies actually identify somewhere else on the label which germs are being tested and killed. Next time you see a “kills 99.99% of germs” label, check out the rest of the label, and you’ll find the small print which specifies that it kills 99.9% of one type of flu, or Covid, or E. Coli, etc. This is why many labels even include an asterisk, i.e.: “Kills 99.99% of Germs!*” Look for the companion asterisk elsewhere on the label for more info.
The way we kill these germs to prevent infections varies based on the germs’ structure. Essentially, we need different “weapons” (cleaning methods) to fight different microbes. A product that kills Flu Viruses and E. Coli can’t necessarily destroy Norovirus or Giardia.
No product is effective against every type of germ, even common germs which regularly cause illness in households and communities.
Hand washing is effective against more germs, not only because it can destroy germs which hand sanitizer cannot, but because it simply washes them off your hands.
Additionally, a lot of the germs that hand sanitiser DOES kill (which, as noted above, is DECIDEDLY NOT ALL OF THEM), many of them are only killed if you break down the surface of the cell.
As in: when you use sanitiser, it’s not enough to simply coat your hands and then air-wave them dry. That’s going to do fuck all.
You have to scrub the hand sanitiser the same way as you scrub with soap. The agitation of the chemicals against the cell is way breaks through the external shell of many germs and kills the bitch inside.
You should be relying on hand washing as a first port of call, but in the instances when your only option is sanitiser, at least use it properly. Squirt on a liberal amount, and then scrub your hands like you would if you were at a sink with soap, for 20 - 30 seconds. Get more sanitiser if you need to. Otherwise, all you’re doing is drying out your hands and killing practically zero bugs.
NOROVIRUS IS NOT KILLED BY MUCH OF ANYTHING.
You have to wash it away! And just 10-100 viral particles are necessary to infect you! People shed BILLIONS in their poop!
And people really do try to interact with fandom like consumers! They want « content ». They act like they can get a refund on reading a fic they don’t like. They add fanfics to goddamned goodreads without a second thought without realizing that’s as ridiculous as adding your friend’s dining room as a restaurant on yelp just so you can post a review about it
“just opening livejournal would have killed you instantly” is the truth lmfaooo
Some studies have shown that while taking medication improves behavioral problems and reduces the distress patients with ADHD experience while trying to do boring school work, it doesn’t improve academic results– they can do more “seatwork” but their scores aren’t actually improved.
Personally, that would make me question whether sitting in one spot for hours doing work sheets is an effective measure of academic improvement or indeed if, *gasp* it is perhaps a completely ineffective way of teaching anyone anything. But the article doesn’t bring this up.
They’ve also seen that for a lot of patients, the positive effects of medication on behavior wear off after about a year.
There’s a fun bit where the author does a little fearmongering about amphetamines being “powerfully addictive.” They site no source on this and then in the next paragraph quote a doctor talking about how adhd medications are considered “easy” to prescribe, because they have no serious side effects and you can stop them at any time without requiring weaning. But they’re powerfully addictive guys, we promise.
They did discover that young kids taking Ritalin long term were on average an inch shorter than their peers. One of the doctors interviewed said:
“The only long-term effect that I know of has been the suppression of growth. If you’re honest, you should tell kids that, look, if you’re interested in next week or next month or even the next year, this is the right treatment for you. But in the long run, you’re going to be shorter. How many kids would agree to take medication? Probably none.”
I think you’d lose that bet. We’re a weirdly height obsessed country, sure, but we’re even more weight obsessed, and I would still take my anti-depressants even if they made me gain far more weight than they did. Who gives a fuck if you’re 5'6” instead of 5'7" if you get to experience even just a year of NOT walking around in a fog all the time?
The author then interviews an adhd teen getting ready to go to college, who tells his parents he takes his meds every day, but he actually he only takes them situationally when he needs to focus, because he likes who he is socially better off the meds (Sooo addictive you guys) and the article talks for a bit about adhd patients deciding to go off their meds because they don’t need them all the time, and the various fucked up ways parents and doctors gaslight them into taking it daily anyway.
I take my stimulants daily, because my functioning without them is low enough that I couldn’t keep my house clean or take care of myself without them. Having some trouble relating to all the kids the author is talking to who only need it to get homework done and say it makes them feel really bad when it wears off. I’m a strong advocate for patients of any kind having the right to stop taking medication if they want to, but I’m thinking maybe they shouldn’t have been prescribed that long term in the first place. And I’m curious why there’s no interviews with people like me.
Presumably because it would weaken the point the article finally gets to about 2/3rds of the way in, which is that some experts are suggesting a move towards a different model of understanding for ADHD where it’s understood as being partially environmental and that ADHD can go away entirely if you’re “in the right environment” and the purpose of medication is to “make an inhospitable environment more tolerable.”
I’m not an expert in anything but being someone who has ADHD obviously, but this article smells off to me.
I’m interested in some of these findings, the stuff about ADHD being a spectrum of symptoms with no clear biological marker right now, the emphasis on alleviating the patient’s distress rather than improving their “behavior.” But the over all way it’s framed… It comes across as “we’re all a little ADHD!”
I think it could have benefited from some conversations with some children’s education specialists and more ADHD adults– The only ADHD adult interviewed is the doctor proposing the new model, who was diagnosed back when it was still called “hyperkinesis.”
I’m happy for anyone who’s ADHD “goes away” when they find the right environment. But that is not my lived experience with it at all. And I have to wonder how good a model for understanding ADHD this is if I and a lot of other ADHD people I know do not fit inside it, but the kid who takes adderal to study and doesn’t need it the rest of the time does.
Thank you so so much! I really appreciate it!
Like, the meds don’t really make me functional, like at all. I can do more but not everything I need to. I’m still disabled. But they make me happier, and I can do more things I enjoy.
Other shit has not.
That’s more than enough.
I recognize that functionality is important, and it can be objectively measured so scientists like it, they can point to hard numbers. Patients got better grades, patients took fewer days off work, patients were able to exercise more.
But the way a patient’s subjective experience of enjoying life is so severely deprioritized in conversations about mental health and related conditions is fucking diseased. It makes me want to break things with hammers.
I'm a gamer, writer, painter, faker, sparkly custom pony maker, bipolar profaniteer,
Jellicle, and very queer. Here's your ticket, come and see this single-beast menagerie. 🎟️
