Tag: Microbes

On an Unusual Prescription

Dr. James Hamblin is a young, successful physician, and he has some questions for you–and, at the end, a rather unorthodox prescription for you if you have any of these issues in your life. But first, a word about Dr. Hamblin. He’s 40, married, and received his education at Indiana University (med school) and UCLA (his residency). He also has a doctorate in Public Health from Yale. Hamblin specializes in preventative care and public health according to his Wikipedia article. And it’s because of his usual suggestion for health that he has become a writer for The Atlantic magazine and has lectured across the globe on how to avoid health issues. He has penned the best-sellers, If Our Bodies Could Talk and Clean.

So, the questions. First, do you have any allergies? Do you suffer from eczema? Do you have asthma? Have these developed over your lifetime or have gotten worse as you grew older?

We will revisit these questions later. But know that Dr. Hamblin will tell you that “you” are not alone. “You” are a gigantic laboratory upon which teem millions of microbes and bacteria. Your skin, the body’s largest organ, is their home. We spend literally billions of dollars purchasing things that clean our bodies from these small creepy-crawlies. Soap for the body as we know it today is a relatively recent invention. The use of soaps (and the showers/baths in which we use them) to cleanse ourselves is now a common occurrence. You bathed today most likely. Sometimes you bathe two (or more) times per day. You spend hours in skin, hair, and body care per year. Hamblin says that if you live to be 100, you will spend about 2% of that time (or two years) in the shower or bath.

I’m reminded of another doctor who was a friend of mine over 20 years ago. This was during the time that things like anti-bacterial soap was first making its debut on the market. This man’s name was Dr. Gaylon Smith, and he laughed at the new product. “ALL soap is anti-biotic,” Gaylon said. He pointed out that the act of washing your hands is killing those germy things that live on our skin; that act of germicide is by definition anti-biotic. And Gaylon was right. Dr. Hamblin agrees.

The idea that our natural smells that come from body odor are somehow repulsive is a created concept, created by the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue in New York. We were told (and sold) the idea that our natural smells were off-putting, unattractive, and needed to be first cleaned (soap) and then disguised (de-odorized with either the soap or deodorant). And this is where we return to the questions we posed earlier.

You see, Dr. Hamblin says that the issues above, the allergies, the eczema, the asthma–these and others–have been exacerbated by our use of soaps. The rate (not merely the raw number) of these issues has risen dramatically over the past 100 years. His argument is that the overuse of soaps has led to an unnatural approach to what defines “clean” and healthy. He says that those little bugs on our skin, those tiny vacuum cleaners on our faces, they have historically kept us from having skins that can naturally fight off issues that our ancestors never really had to contend with in past centuries. His recommendation, his prescription for this increase?

Stop showering.

In fact, Hamblin has enjoyed a certain celebrity by telling the public that he, as a doctor, has not had a bath in over 5 years.

On Lunar Trash Bags

Did you realize that there’s an experiment that was left on the moon that is still ongoing? It’s true.

The United States made six successful trips to the moon with humans onboard. Those journeys, from July of 1969 to December 1972 (Apollo 11 to Apollo 17), were summed up (somewhat grammatically awkwardly) by Neil Armstrong when he said that stepping onto the surface of the satellite was a small step in one way but a giant leap for mankind in another sense. And he was right. Those six landings captivated the world and still do to this day.

However, wherever mankind goes, trash goes with mankind. That’s certainly true of the moon as well. And besides the mechanical stuff that the astronauts left, things like the lunar rover, the landing “gear” that the modules took off from, various tools, and the now-bleached out flags and poles, there is another classification of garbage that the humans left that particularly interests scientists today, more than 50 years after humans last visited the moon.

The astronauts left this type of garbage on purpose. And this garbage is in 96 bags. They knew when they left it on the moon’s surface that the composition of the bags was teeming with life. Over 1,000 different types of microbes and species of bacteria are in those bags according to scientists. And it’s possible that fungi could have formed in the microbial bags. Thus, these 96 bags represent an interesting experiment in how living things can–or even if they can–live in an environment as sterile as the moon’s surface.

The extreme temperatures of the moon are a great test tube for this experiment. And, to be fair, the likelihood of anything surviving is slim. However, if the microbes can survive on the moon, well, they could be a signal that we can send things like seedlings or the basic building blocks of life long distances in space. Microbes can survive in the most unlikely places and in ultra-extreme conditions. This experiment might help us understand if we can maybe send life to planets that could be somehow “greened” or made habitable over time. This entire enterprise makes astro-microbiologists (yes, that’s a thing) really excited about the possibilities here on earth and the beginnings of life on our own planet. And the lunar experiment is still waiting for mankind to return to the moon to see how–and if–the microbes and bacteria survived in these bags.

And to think, all of this excitement over 96 bags of human poop.