#germophobe

Since cold and flu (and covid) season is approaching, I thought I'd make a post about obsessive hand washing because it's something I've been struggling with for years. So here are some thing you can do to protect your hands and maybe lower the amount of compulsions surrounding cleaning/washing if you can.

If your hands are not currently split open or raw, buy or use some cream that's thick and fit for dry, sensitive skin. My favorite is Cetaphil's Moisturizing Cream for very dry to dry, sensitive skin. However, it's a bit expensive, so I've been using Equate Therapeutic Dry Skin Cream. (From my experience the creams are thicker and make my hands feel better, but they come in jars, so if you have a fear or compulsion about not wanting to put your hands in your products, they have tubes and bottles out there)

If your hands are split open or raw, please don't use lotion or cream on them! Trust me, it'll burn. A few years ago, I looked up remedies, and I found that olive oil doesn't burn and does the trick! So when my hands were split, for the first day or two, I'd put olive oil on a few times a day, and then after they healed a little bit, I'd move to a lotion and vaseline combo. Although, olive oil has gotten a bit more expensive where I live, so if you live somewhere where it's the same, coconut oil can work as well.

I totally forgot to add- if you wash your hands with very hot water and dish soap: please do not do this anymore! it's drying out your hands so much faster. dish soap is not meant for hands, it's very rough. also, water so hot to the point it's steaming is only detrimental to your skin. you'll kill the germs by using regular hand soap and cold water. :)

Tips on not to wash as much:

Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

From September 20 to 27, 1950, the U.S. Navy released the pathogens off the shore of San Francisco. Based on results from monitoring equipment at 43 locations around the city, the Army determined that San Francisco had received enough of a dose for nearly all of the city's 800,000 residents to inhale at least 5,000 of the particles.

On October 11, 1950, eleven residents checked into Stanford Hospital for very rare, serious urinary tract infections. Although ten residents recovered, one patient, Edward J. Nevin, died three weeks later. None of the other hospitals in the city reported similar spikes in cases, and all 11 victims had urinary-tract infections following medical procedures, suggesting that the source of their infections lay inside the hospital. The urinary tract outbreak was so unusual that the Stanford doctors wrote it up for a medical journal.

Cases of pneumonia in San Francisco also increased after Serratia marcescens was released, though a causal relation has not been conclusively established.

The bacterium was also combined with phenol and an anthrax simulant and sprayed across south Dorset by US and UK military scientists as part of the DICE trials that ran from 1971 to 1975.

There was no evidence that the Army had alerted health authorities before it blanketed the region with bacteria. 

Doctors later wondered whether the experiment might be responsible for heart valve infections around the same time as well as serious infections seen among intravenous drug users in the 1960s and 1970s.