[msandford]

I didn't see anything in the article that said "I stopped washing my hands after I used the bathroom" but I did see plenty about "I stopped using soaps and shampoos and other SHOWER related items".

I think you misunderstood the goal of the experiment and the method by which she did so. Culturing less-harmful bacteria which might crowd out more-harmful bacteria is actually a great thing.

The ultimate situation is where we're all covered in incredibly weaksauce bacteria that can be killed quite easily if need be, but in the meantime they out-compete all the truly nasty ones which are antibiotic-resistant. That way if someone gets an infection antibiotics (or scrubbing) will go a long way towards curing it in the rapidly-post-antibiotic era that some doctors think we are entering.

[pbnjay]

There's a blog post with more quotes: http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/julia-scott-on-...

Specifically, she did wash her hands with soap:

> Every time I touched my hair, I had to wash my hands (I did wash my hands with soap).