I get how soap works by breaking down outer layers of cells, especially in viruses and bacteria, which is how it protects us (correct me if I’m wrong). My question is why does everyone, including surgeons scrubbing in for surgery, massage the soap around their hands and arms? Couldn’t we just apply the soap, wait 20 seconds, then rinse it off? Maybe it’s a surface area thing, making sure soap is applied everywhere?
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The ‘massage’ is a way of more effectively getting the dirt, dead cells, bacteria, etc, off the skin. The same way that if you want to clean stuff off the floor you might need to scrub at it with a scrub brush.
Scrubbing helps break up dirt and oils on our skin. This ensures that everything can be washed off. Soap basically makes water ‘wetter’, more able to pull stuff off our skin and into solution/suspension with the water.
A lot of the ‘dirt’ on your hands isn’t actually killed or neutralized by soap…it’s dissolved into the water and washed away. You need friction to make this process happen.
Handwashing is primarily a mechanical process (your hands physically moving) rather than a chemical process. Soap is just an aid.
If you do a full scrub before going into an operating room (or, in my case, the neonatal ICU), it takes about 10 minutes and involves a stiff brush for scrubbing, not a gentle “massage.” The goal is to remove all the bacteria and, if necessary, the top layer of skin.
You are, in fact, wrong. Soap works by breaking apart oils, etc so that the combination of friction from rubbing them together and the movement of the water can effectively wash dirt and germs off of your skin. It has nothing to do with killing the germs or breaking down cells. Antibacterial soap is a combination of soap and another agent that kills germs, but the germ killing part is unrelated to the cleaning effects of the soap.
Soap doesn’t inherently kill germs or bacteria. It encompasses them and flushes them down the sink. Same thing with dirt. To maximize how many particulates get encapsulated in the soap, scrubbing to break the adhesion and release from your skin is necessary and thus maximizes how many go down the drain.
Anti bacterial soaps do kills germs but it is specifically because it’s anti bacterial, not because it is soap.
“Lathering” the soap is what helps it lubricate and lift germs away from the skin.
Dipping your dirty hand in a bucket of soap and letting it sit there for an hour will still not clean as well as lathering soap for 10 seconds.
Here’s my analogy.
Think of a dirty pan that you just cooked some chicken in.
Add a lot of liquid soap. Let it sit there for 3 minutes. Give it a quick rinse.
What is the result? Almost nothing.
Add a small amount of liquid soap. Let it sit for 2 seconds then scrub with a brush.
The result? A clean pan.
You need a combination of a detergent that will surround the oil/grime/bacteria/whatever, and the physical action to remove the stuff that wants to stick to the surface (whether it’s your hand or a pan). Bacteria and germs love to stick to animal skin. Just pouring some water of it, even with some soap applied, doesn’t do much.
You lather the soap and scrub/lightly abrade the skin. The lather is what encapsulates the dirts/oils/grime and leads to cleanliness once it is then washed away. A soap that does not lather is not nearly as effective as one that does.
Soap is a magnet. One side of soap molecule sticks to water. One side of soap molecule sticks to fat.
The goal is to stick the fat on the outside of bacteria and dirt to the water using soap then rinse the water down the drain.
“Massaging” the soap helps mix the fat, water, and soap together so the correct end of the soap sticks to the fat and the other end sticks to the water.
Then you massage again as you rinse the soap (and water and fat) down the drain.
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