Quote:
Originally Posted by fargon
How do you not clean your hands when you wash them?
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It's not the water or the soap that does most of the cleaning; but, the mechanical action of the skin on one hand rubbing against the skin on the other that dislodges contamination. The soap and water rinse it all away. Most people don't, for instance, wrap one hand around the thumb of the other hand and use a back and forth twisting motion to clean that thumb all the way around. Other areas get less scrubbing action too.
For comparison, when doing a surgical scrub, each part of each hand and forearm is treated like a four sided object. To scrub just one finger, it takes 15 scrub brush strokes on each of the four imaginary sides (this provides overlap so no area is missed) and 15 strokes across the tip of the finger to clean under the end of the fingernail as well. That's 75 brush strokes per digit, 375 brush strokes just for the fingers of just one hand.
The same technique is applied to the broad area of the hands: palm, back, knife edge and web with particular attention to the web between the thumb and index finger. Just washing the hands comprises 1,350 scrub brush strokes. In a surgical scrub, the wrists and forearms are done too.
All of that is just to get really clean, it's not even going to make human skin sterile. It still has to be covered with sterile gloves and gown. Those things can tear though; so, the surgical scrub still has it's place.
Kinda makes you wonder how you ever survived sucking your thumb as a toddler.