Author: DougR
Date: 2013-03-21 03:13
Ya know, funny this thread came up. I do some work (non-musical) in a hospital environment where medical students are instructed, and they're absolutely rabid about hand-washing and/or Purell-ing (at least, the faculty is...for some students, it's still an acquired skill). Good thing, right? (because of all the hospital-borne infections, I mean.) Well, maybe not, since all the antibacterial soaps and wipes and sprays force bacteria to become superbacteria, no longer controllable by known antibiotics--they can mutate faster than us humans can come up with antibacterials to fight them.
Anyhoo, was in conversation the other day with a biochemist friend who was touting the virtues of 'thieves oil,' as an antibacterial--it's a mixture of essential oils (clove, cinnamon, lemon, etc), each having specific antibacterial properties that bacteria can't mutate against. There's a pediatrician in NJ who mixes his own version, uses it in his practice, and recommends it over Purell and even hand-washing, because bacteria can't mutate against it.
Here's the fun part: allegedly, thieves' oil was discovered during medieval plague times, and used by grave-robbers to keep from catching plague from the corpses' graves they were robbing.
My biochemist friend is all for letting his kids eat playground dirt, on the theory that if they're not exposed to bacteria, they can't develop an immunity to it either. Makes sense to me, I prefer a clean mouthpiece but as far as catching a cold from someone else's germy horn, that seems a far stretch to me. Truth is, one can't say for sure where one's "sick contact" came from, there could be so many we don't even know about.
As far as "sludge in the bocal," I remember that Columbia Records refused to let the cleaning staff into their old 30th Street studio, at all EVER, on the theory that removing even a micron of dirt would have changed the acoustics. I think one time they changed the curtains, which were literally disintegrating from age, and the staff had PTSD for six months afterwards.
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