Either way is fine, as long as you feel comfortable and are able to clean yourself. There are no official statistics detailing how many people sit or stand to wipe their butts. Informal surveys suggest the majority of adults wipe while seated, while at least 30% stand up to wipe.
While a Reddit user surveyed 950 participants—626 identified as male, 306 identified as female, and 18 people put their gender as “other”—they found that 65.7% of respondents wipe sitting down and 34.3% wipe standing up. But even though standing wipers may be in the minority, they do exist.
Should you wipe standing up? In terms of cleanliness, it's a bit of a matter of personal preference. However you feel cleanest is likely ideal, though it's best to be thorough, no matter how exactly you choose to go about it.
Wiping Front to Back
If you don't have any physical limitations preventing you from reaching around your body to wipe from front to back, it's generally considered the safer route to go. You'll be moving feces away from your more delicate parts, lowering the risk of infection.
Lesson number one: "Always wipe from front to back," says Alyssa Dweck, M.D., an ob-gyn and author of V is for Vagina. "Wiping from back to front can bring bacteria from the rectum toward the urethra and increase your chances of a urinary tract infection," she explains.
Common causes of fecal incontinence include diarrhea, constipation, and muscle or nerve damage. The muscle or nerve damage may be associated with aging or with giving birth.
After comfortably passing a stool, always wipe from front to back. Avoid any skin-to-skin contact with stool. Simply reach behind your back and between your legs, using plenty of crumpled or folded toilet tissue. Wipe backward from the perineum , the space between the genitals and anus, moving toward and past the anus.
It's completely normal to wipe anywhere from between one to three times. If you have a lot of soft or pasty poop when you wipe, it's likely that you didn't empty things out completely.
By 4 years old, your child should be to wipe their own bottom but may need some occasional help. Of course, each child learns toilet training at different ages so this may vary between 3.5 to 5 years old.
Common causes include: Chronic diarrhea Constipation Hemorrhoids Crohn's disease The skin of the anus can stick to the stool and make it difficult to clean the anorectal area after a bowel movement. Leaky gut Leaky gut is also known as fecal incontinence.
Ideally, you should need to wipe a couple times after a bowel movement, says James Gordon, MD, a gastroenterologist with Banner Health in Sun City West, Arizona. Wiping one, two or three times is likely totally normal.
“Wiping front-to-back minimizes the risk of spreading bacteria,” Audra Williams, M.D., clinical instructor and ob/gyn at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System, tells SELF.
Wet wipes are always used after pooping by 14% of people, while just 7% use them whenever they pee. In terms of how Americans wipe, more say they wipe in the doctor-recommended direction from front to back (51%) than from back to front (20%). Front-to-back wiping is more common among women (61%) than among men (40%).
An anal fissure is a tear in the skin of the anus that results after the passage of hard stool or from the trauma of excessive wiping.
Right-handedness is the most common with 90% of individuals considered to be more effective with this hand.
Studies have shown that the average bowel movement takes 12 seconds. Sometimes it does take longer, however, so at maximum, you should not spend more than 10 minutes on the toilet.
Failure to wipe correctly could leave you vulnerable to a urinary tract infection or aggravate any existing rectal issues, like hemorrhoids or anal fissures. That's why Health turned to a gynecologist, a medical doctor specializing in the female reproductive tract.
You see, when you don't clean yourself down there after peeing, the urine droplets stuck in your pubes get transferred to your underwear. This gives rise to a foul odour. Moreover, it also gives birth to bacteria in your underwear, increasing the risk of urinary tract infections (UTI).
From a hygiene perspective, wet wipes win. For a more effective clean, wet wipes win hands down. For a more soothing and gentle cleansing experience, we'll have to go with wet wipes again. From a cost perspective, toilet paper comes out ahead.
She goes on to explain,"when you are wiping more than two or three times, that is called faecal smearing.. "So it is essentially when too much faecal matter stays at the entrance of the anus even after you have finished your poo."
One mum has shared the incredible simple way you can guarantee to only get one wipe out of the packet at a time. The solution, like it so often happens, is incredibly easy: you simply cut the sides of the opening in the packet. This little cut guarantees you only get one wipe at a time.