Recently, while attending in the lab, I received a call from my close friend Noisy Dove who was on vacation in the wild west of Utah. He posed an interesting question to me, looking for the expertise of a Doctor to satisfy his inquiry. His question was this…

“Is it really necessary to build a nest before using a public restroom? It has always been my understanding that ass-itch and dick-rot are illnesses commonly caught from toilet seats. If so, could you recommend an effective nest building technique? I favor the quick twin-rail approach with a safety sheet over the front of the bowl to keep from accidentally touching my wank on anything. I’ve seen some pretty impressive nests constructed by making numerous loose roles of tissue and lining them up. And I’ve pondered just lifting the seat up and wrapping it thoroughly before taking a seat.

Oh, and what about those specially made seat covers in the dispenser? Will those substitute for a nest? There is a little trick to using those without tearing them in half AND having an opening through which to drop your shit through – but hell if I know what that trick is.

My other idea is to get one of those little cans of Lysol and just blast the whole thing down then dab it off.“

So first, let’s clear up a couple of facts. Ass-itch is rarely associated with public toilet seat use. There are numerous contagious rashes one could presumably catch ass-to-ass via a toilet seat, but most of these conditions are more likely to be transferred via the hand to the ass. Other causes of ass-itch are heat induced rashes and of course not properly cleaning the ass after defecation. Dick-rot will not likely be transferred via a toilet seat. This condition is almost always associated with poor hygiene – neglecting the shower and not changing underwear. Look it up.

More common dangers involving the public toilet seat are diseases in the urine and feces that inconsiderate low-lives leave on the seat. Most of these will not infect a person through the ass skin, but could be transferred other ways. Say you sit on a seat with Hepatitis piss on it. Then later you scratch your ass. Then later still you use that same hand without washing it to free a popcorn cornel from the back of your thought. You might catch Hepatitis this way. So certainly, if you reduce your ass’s contact with the toilet seat it will reduce the chance of catching disease – and so will thoroughly washing your hands often.

As for a technique, I would start before you even enter the john. I always try to kick my way to the toilet without touching anything. I then poke the toilet paper role with my pinky until I can grab a nice long piece – discarding the first foot immediately. I can then use that tissue to touch everything else – starting with the stall door and a preliminary sanitary flush or two.

The actual nesting technique I use is often more dependent on quickness rather than cleanliness – so I also usually use the twine rail method with safety sheet. But if I’m not is a hurry, or suspect I may be seated for a duration of time, I’ll certainly spend some extra time laying down a more thorough layering all around.

The Lysol idea is a good one. I might use that as well. It’s similar to another measure I often take. If I have a bottle of water with me, I’ll often give the seat a quick rinse and dry it with tissue.

In severe cases I’ve actually used toilet water to rinse off the seat by dipping a wad of tissue. When the seat is really bad – a rinse with well flushed toilet water is an improvement.

Obama, since he started his candidacy, has used somewhat rosy numbers to calculate the costs and benefits of the policies he advocates. His first big one was the promise of “tax cuts” for the poor and middle class, do you remember, even for people who don’t pay income taxes in order to “spread the wealth around”? And added to that he was also going to reduce the national debt. Yeah, campaigns are historically full of wishful promises.

After inauguration this didn’t change though. Right away we had the obnoxiously obese stimulus bill. That was based on the rosiest of rosy turn-arounds and unemployment rates. It was hard-core wrong of course, things rarely have the best possible outcome.

So let’s remember this as we examine new legislation. Here is a prime example of a rosy assumption in this health care reform effort: if we put money into prevention it will save the new health care system money in the future. That sounds perfectly logical. Seriously! Let’s make sure we treat our diabetes so we don’t have the expense of foot removal.

In some cases this logic will apply. Someone who suffers from seizures, for example, can sometimes be easily treated with a cheap daily medicine (It’s seriously cheap, my dog is on it). The alternative would be a person seizing and falling on the floor and getting hurt all the time – costing money.

However, according to the Congressional Budget Office, prevention would at best result in marginal savings, and could very well cost more. Here is a good article on the subject:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476182985608115.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Disease prevention, like cancer screens, is money spent on people who weren’t going to get sick anyway. You have to screen a lot of people to find the sick ones and you get false positives that require further tests. And life style change is a touchy subject. Even if our society takes the path of compelling people to live a certain way, changing that behavior is about impossible. Look at all the expensive stop-smoking programs – and holy crap look at the diet industry.

Even though cancer, heart attacks, and other common problems are expensive to treat, preventing them isn’t any cheaper when budgeting for a whole society, and as technology improves and creates better screens it will likely get more expensive. And worse, prevention would produce another large cost these types of programs are rarely constructed to handle: people not dying at a convenient age. That is one of the main problems with Social Security. During FDR’s time you were doing well to reach 65 – now you have to get into a car accident to die that young.

Now – if you’re a person who has a difficult time grasping overall subjects and main ideas – you might disagree with a perceived conclusion – I don’t believe in prevention. If that’s the case you can relax. I haven’t made a conclusion.

Here is my conclusion: Contrary to the idea Obama is trying to sell us, prevention won’t be one of the things that miraculously gives all Americans access to health care without raising taxes on the non-rich.

So see, you had nothing to be disagreeable about. In fact, I very much believe in prevention. I also believe in health care/insurance reform. Specifically, I believe in leaving health care the hell alone, for the most part, and focus more on an electronic medical records standard and ways to grow the medical field. Insurance laws need some changes. People get screwed way too often and you should be able to buy into groups outside of an employer.