Apple #287: Anniversaries

• Most people think of the word "anniversary" in connection with weddings, or how long a couple has been married. But really, an anniversary can mark any event.

• The word comes from two Latin words, annus which means "year", and versus which means "turned." In other words, an anniversary commemorates the passage of a year.

"The best way to forget something is to commemorate it."
--The History Boys, by Alan Bennett

• People's religious calendars are full of anniversaries. Christmas and Easter, Yom Kippur and Lag B'omer, Vaisakhi, Eid-Ul-Fitr and Ashura, All Souls' Feast -- pretty much every religion has its annual celebrations which are all forms of anniversaries.
  

• In fact, the first known use of the word "anniversary" in English was in a religious sense. The word first appeared in print around 1230 A.D. in a devotional book for nuns. It wasn't until 1673 that the phrase "wedding anniversary" appeared in English usage.

"I once wanted to be an atheist, but I gave up -- they have no holidays."
--Henny Youngman

• A birthday is a kind of anniversary. The Spanish way of wishing someone "happy birthday" makes this pretty plain: felix compleanos literally means "happy completion of another year."

"He that outlives this day, and comes safe home
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named"
--Henry V, Shakespeare

• Our Independence Day here in the United States is another kind of anniversary. Each year, we celebrate the passage of another year since our country declared its independence from England and we mark the fact that our country is another year older.

• Veterans' Day, sometimes also called Armistice Day, commemorates the end of World War I. The war officially ended in June of 1919, but on November 11, 1918, the Allied nations and Germany agreed to a temporary cease-fire, or armistice. So Veterans Day is celebrated each year on November 11.

• That day also happens to be the birthday of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (RIP)

"At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."
--"For the Fallen," by Laurence Binyon

• For some people, anniversaries can be really difficult. If someone you love has died, anniversaries seem to pop up all over the place, and they can trigger feelings of sadness all over again. Such difficult days can include the anniversary of the person's death day, their birthday, Christmas or other holidays that had particular meaning, or if it was a romantic relationship, days that were especially important to the two of you such as the day you first met.

"The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart."
--"Holidays" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• If this is true for you, allow yourself the time to feel whatever it is you're feeling. Just because a certain amount of time has passed, that doesn't mean you're supposed to be "over it." Sad things happen. It's okay to be sad.

• Some things you can do on difficult anniversaries include:

• Make sure you're with friends or family members

• List the good things you remember about the person you lost

• Write the person a letter telling him or her all the things you meant to say
  

• Start a new tradition in honor of the person, such as making a journey someplace meaningful, or establishing a charitable fund in your loved one's memory

• If it's a loss you share with others, such as a loss of your loved one to war, attending a group ceremony or memorial can bring you together with others at a difficult time.

Whether you're having a bad anniversary or a good one, know that there will be more good anniversaries to come. More birthdays, more peace agreements, more feast days, more life.




Sources
History.org, The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Anniversaries and the Origin of History, by Michael Olmert
India Pakistan Trade Unit, Sikh Religious Holidays and Muslim Religious Holidays
Exploring Religions, Buddhism, Time and Worship
United States Department of Veterans Affairs, History of Veterans Day
MayoClinic's article sourced at CNN, Grief: Coping with reminders after a loss
Quotations found using Bartleby's, Quoteland, and Michael Olmert's page on Anniversaries

Apple #270: Blood Pressure

About a week ago, I donated blood. Then a few days later, I went to the doctor to ask them to tell me whether my broken toe was healing properly (it is, it's just taking a long time). Then another few days later, I had a "health assessment" done so I could get $10 off per month of my health insurance. In all three events, somebody tested my blood pressure.

They always tell me the numbers, and they always tell me it's good. But in truth, I have no idea what the numbers mean. I asked two of the three nurses who took my blood pressure to explain it to me, but they both said, "the first number is the systolic, and the second number is the diastolic." Totally unhelpful.

Time for the Apple Lady to get helpful.

• When someone "takes your blood pressure," they're getting a measurement of the force of the blood as it hits your artery walls. It's a way of seeing how well your heart is working, if it's pumping too hard or if it's not pumping hard enough, and also how much room there is in your arteries for the blood to get through.

• In most people, your heart beats about 60-70 times a minute when you're not exercising.
  

Measuring your pulse means you're counting the number of times your heart pumps per minute.
(Image from Oregon Health & Science University)

• When your heart pumps, the blood rushes faster through your arteries. When it relaxes or contracts, the blood slows in your arteries.

• Blood pressure measures those two extremes: the point of highest pressure when the heart is pumping, and the point of lowest pressure when the heart is relaxing.

• The high pressure measurement is called the systolic pressure (the first of the two numbers), and the low pressure measurement is the diastolic pressure (the second).

• There are all sorts of ways that medical people can measure blood pressure. But the most common method is to strap a cuff around your arm, secure it with Velcro, and inflate the cuff.

This is the cuff, with the pump that inflates it, the gauge that measures pressure, and the stethoscope the nurse uses to listen to your blood sounds. You can order this one for adults from Gould's Discount Medical for $48.

• Here's what's happening when they're using that blood pressure cuff:

• The nurse inflates that cuff until it literally stops the circulation in your arm.

• Then the nurse releases the valve that allows air to escape the cuff slowly, thus relaxing the cuff and allowing the blood flow to begin flowing again into your arm

• As the blood begins filling your arteries again, the nurse listens with a stethoscope to your arm near the cuff, in order to hear the sounds the blood is making as it re-enters your arteries.

• The sound the blood makes changes as more blood flows in. At first, it makes a distinct tapping. The moment the nurse hears this initial tapping, whatever the number is on the cuff's gauge represents the systolic number.

This man is having his blood pressure taken. Apparently he's also told a joke or something that the nurse doesn't find that funny. It's nice that he's having a good time, but she's probably trying to listen to his blood sounds and would rather hear the joke when she's done.
(Photo from Independent Health Care Plan)

• As the air continues to escape the cuff, the sounds get softer but the tapping or pulsing lasts longer, then for some reason the sounds get louder again and more distinct, and then the sounds grow muffled again, and finally they become completely indistinct.

• The moment when the last sound is heard, the nurse records the number on the gauge as the diastolic number.

• When the nurse is finished with the measurement, he or she will tell you, in a shorthand fashion, your systolic and diastolic pressure readings. For example, the last time my blood pressure was taken, the nurse told me, "It's 115 over 68. That's good."

• Here is what the American Heart Association defines as healthy blood pressure ranges and what's problematic:

	Systolic	Diastolic
Normal	below 120	below 80
Pre-hypertensive	120-139	80-89
Stage 1 hypertension	140-159	90-99
Stage 2 hypertension	160 +	100 +

• Of course these numbers are not absolute. Your blood pressure changes all the time, depending on whether you've just exercised, what you recently ate, if you're taking any medications, if you're sitting or standing, even what your mood is like that day.
  

• Other factors that can affect your blood pressure reading more dramatically include:

• As people get older, their systolic pressure gets higher while the diastolic gets lower.
  

• Young children who are in the midst of a big growth spurt can have very high systolic numbers.

• Some people also "test" high when in the presence of a doctor or a nurse because they're nervous. This is referred to as "white coat hypertension."

• Some medications can also inflate your blood pressure. Sometimes that effect goes away when you stop the medication; in other cases it doesn't.

• So if your blood pressure numbers are a little high on one occasion, that might not be a sign of a problem.
  

• But if your blood pressure tests often enough in one of the other categories, you should talk to your doctor.
  

When there's less space for the blood to flow through, the pressure will be higher. So if your blood pressure readings are high, this might be happening inside your arteries.
(Diagram from Physical Therapy.ca)

• In general, here's what the "problematic" categories mean:

• Pre-hypertensive: it would be a good idea to improve your diet by doing things like reducing your salt intake, increasing the amount of leafy greens and whole grains you eat, and increasing the amount that you exercise.

• Stage 1 hypertension: you and your doctor should monitor your blood pressure regularly, you'll want to make some fairly extensive changes to your diet, quit smoking, drink less alcohol, exercise more, etc. Your doctor might also prescribe you a medication to help reduce your blood pressure.

• Stage 2 hypertension: your doctor will prescribe something to reduce your blood pressure as soon as possible. You'll also need to make radical changes in your lifestyle.
  

This blood pressure monitor is one of several available for people to test themselves at home. This one has an audio feature that reads the results aloud, and includes a jack for headphones if you want to keep those numbers private. It's avilable from QuickMedical for $120.


And here's something else that I feel like medical people don't say but should: if you don't test "normal," that doesn't mean you're a bad, bad person who needs to reform or just get it over with and die already (actually, I think it's the insurance companies who are responsible for that implication).

What it means is that, if you want to improve your the way your body works and how feels to move around in your body -- and maybe you don't -- you can do some things to improve your body's function. Though in some cases, you can't really help what's happening, so you'll want to find a way to live with what's going on the best that you can.

We're all human, our bodies get stuff wrong with them over time, the flesh gets tired. That's the way it goes. You can't give anybody bad marks for simply being alive.

Sources
American Heart Association, Blood Pressure
American Heart Association, Recommendations for Blood Pressure Measurement in Humans, December 20, 2004
Medline Plus, Blood pressure, July 21, 2006
Life Clinic, What is Blood Pressure?
ehealthMD, How is High Blood Pressure Treated? October 2004
Health A to Z, Hypertension

Apple #223: Health Benefits of Herbal Tea

I've been drinking a lot of herbal tea lately. I can't have caffeine anymore, for one thing, and for another, my nose and throat feel somewhat arid these winter days, especially right after I wake up. The steaminess of the tea seems to soothe my nose and throat, and the warmth of the tea travels into me and warms me from the inside out.


(Photo from Stock.xchng)


I also like a lot of the flavors of various herbal teas. Right now, my favorites are a combination of peppermint & spearmint with a little cinnamon thrown in, another variety that includes a little snappiness of ginger, and yet another richer tea that has a vanilla flavor going on.

Drinking all this tea has me wondering, can herbal tea somehow contribute to the health of my heart, perhaps? Are there some secret health benefits to these various grocery-store-available herbal teas?

I should say up front that I'm not interested in things like drinking echinacea tea to improve immunity, or drinking raspberry leaf tea to counteract PMS. I'm more interested in a general health benefit. Black tea, for example, is supposed to have anti-oxidant and therefore some anti-cancer and anti-stroke properties. So does herbal tea have any similar kind of general benefit?

• First of all, I learned that herbal tea is not, in fact, tea. Black tea and green tea and even red tea all come from the same evergreen tea plant called Camellia sinensis.
  

The leaves of this one plant, Camellia sinensis, can be processed in different ways to make black, green, red, or even white teas.
(Photo from the Tea Museum)

• The leaves from this plant contain polyphenols, which are chemicals that, when consumed, protect our tissues against damaging things called free radicals. They can also deactivate other substances that trigger the growth of cancer cells. Polyphenols are the magic things in tea that give it those extra health benefits.

• Herbal teas are not made from the Camellia sinensis leaves. Herbal teas are usually infusions of other types of herbs and flowers and spices -- but not the tea leaf. Therefore herbal teas are technically not "teas," but are in fact "tisanes."

• Since herbal teas -- excuse me, tisanes -- are not made from the same plant as black or green teas, they do not necessarily confer the same benefits.

• I looked for more information about what herbal teas -- dang it, tisanes -- can do for you, but I'm getting the impression that herbal teas -- tisanes -- seem to be regarded by the medical research community as the realm of crackpots or something because they don't seem to have done the same kind of research into herbal health benefits as they have for black teas. That's just my impression, though, and it's possible that lots of highfalutin' research has actually been conducted that I don't know about.
  

• However, one study conducted by the American Chemical Society found that people who drank five cups of chamomile tea each day increased their levels of hippurate. The "parent," so to speak, of hippurate is phenolics -- the same group of good-for-you chemicals that you get from drinking black or green or red tea. So it looks like chamomile tea might, in fact, provide you with some of the same benefits as black or green tea.
  

Chamomile flowers, frequently dried and used to make tisanes, are members of the daisy family. So if you're allergic to daisies, don't drink chamomile tea.
(Photo from Plantlife)

• Phenolics also help increase antibacterial resistance, so people who drink chamomile tea could see an increased resistance to colds and infections.

• Another study also found that chamomile tea has "mild antioxidant and antimicrobial activities," meaning, again, that chamomile tea could be moderately useful in fighting colds and infections.

• This other study also found that, in animals, chamomile tea helped lower cholesterol and protect against inflammation, which can contribute to anything from headaches to arteriosclerosis. They caution that these benefits have been studied only in animals and that similar studies on humans are "limited."
  

• Other stuff in the chamomile tea acts as a nerve and muscle relaxant, which may help soothe muscle spasms -- often those associated with menstrual cramps -- and which may be why hot herbal tea acts as a mild sedative.
  

• Too bad I don't like the flavor of chamomile tea. And some people are allergic to chamomile.

• But researchers seem to have picked chamomile because of its popularity. They've already discovered the polyphenols in wine, and they know that those chemicals are present in lots of plant foods. So I'm willing to bet that if these benefits are true for chamomile tea, the same or similar benefits are probably also true of other herbal teas -- tisanes.

• Medical researchers, here's another thing for you to get to work quantifying for us.
  

Sources
Gloria Tsang, Health Benefits of Tea, April 2006
Cynthia Brook, Medical College of Wisconsin, Studies Suggest Health Benefits of Tea, March 30, 2000
MedicineNet, Definition of Polyphenol
Michael Bernstein, American Chemical Society, "Chamomile tea: New evidence supports health benefits," January 4, 2005
Diane McKay and Jeffrey Blumberg, "A Review of the Bioactivity and Potential Health Benefits of Chamomile Tea," Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, July 1, 2006
Acu-Cell Nutrition, Bioflavonoids

Apple #160: Benefits of Quitting Smoking

In the past few months, many of my friends and co-workers have quit smoking. Hooray and congratulations to you!

One of the questions that an ex-smoker-still-friend has asked is, how long does it take for your body to heal itself from the damage smoking has done to it? What stages or processes does your body go through in recovering from smoking? He particularly wanted to know, how long would he be coughing up goo?


These are the ashy and blackened lungs of someone who was a smoker for an unknown number of years.
(Photo from Premier Exhibitions, at National Geographic's site on the "Bodies" cadaver exhibition that was on display at Florida's Museum of Science and Industry in February 2006)


First, some of the risks you incur when you take on the smoking habit:

• Increased risk of dying from lung cancer: 22 times higher than non-smokers if you're male, 12 times higher if you're female

• Increased risk of dying from coronary heart disease: 2 times that of non-smokers

• Increased risk of dying of stroke: 2 times that of non-smokers

• Increased risk of developing these other potentially fatal cancers besides lung cancer:

• larynx

• esophagus

• oral cavity

• bladder

• pancreas

• cervix
  

• Increased risk of developing the following conditions, which are leading causes of death:

• chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

• emphysema
  

• influenza

• pneumonia

• peripheral artery occlusive disease

• abdominal aortic aneurysm (blood clots in your gut that can rupture without warning)

The lung of someone who died of emphysema
(Photo from University of South Wales' Museum of Human Disease)

• Increased risk of other conditions which, though not necessarily fatal, can be pretty nasty:

• bronchitis

• ulcer of the stomach

• ulcer of the duodenum

• Risks you give your children, if you smoke around them:

• increased number of respiratory infections such as pneumonia or bronchitis

• more likely to develop acute ear infections and persistent middle ear disease, which is treated by inserting tubes in the child's ears

• increased risk of developing asthma
  

Smoker's lung on the left vs. non-smoker's lung on the right
(Image sourced from City-Data.com's forum on motivating someone to quit smoking)


Now here's how your body heals itself and slowly moves away from those bad and nasty diseases. The following time markers represent the amount of time elapsed since smoking your last cigarette.

• 20 minutes - your heart rate drops

• 12 hours - carbon monoxide levels in blood drop to normal

• 1 to 2 days - nicotine withdrawal symptoms peak and then drop rapidly over the following weeks

• 2 days - senses of smell and taste noticeably improve

• 2 weeks to 3 months - circulation and immune system function improve. Risk for heart attack begins to drop and lung function begins to improve

• 1 to 9 months - coughing and shortness of breath decrease

• 1 year - the additional risk of heart attack that smoking gave you is cut in half (you're still at the same risk of heart attack for non-smokers, plus half the risk a smoker has)

• 3 to 5 years - risks of cervical and bladder cancer are reduced

• 5 years - persistent cough, sputum production, or wheezing reduced in most former smokers drops to near that of non-smokers
  

• 5 to 15 years - risk of stroke drops down to that of a non-smoker's. Risk of cancers of the mouth, throat, and esophagus is halved.

• 10 years - risk of lung cancer drops to half that of a smoker's (wow, so 10 years after quitting, your risk of getting lung cancer is still higher than a non-smoker's). Also, the risk of getting cancers of the mouth, throat, esophagus, bladder, kidney and pancreas decrease further.

• 15 years - risk of coronary heart disease declines to that of a non-smoker's.

• Eventually, the health and function of your lungs will return to that of those who never smoked. The time that takes will vary depending on how many cigarettes you used to smoke per day, how many years you smoked, your gender (it takes longer for your lungs to recover if you're male), and the presence or absence of other environmental hazards.
  

A nice, pink, healthy set of lungs
(Photo from NeverSmokeAgain.com)

Some other data:

• Women who quit smoking before getting pregnant reduce the risk that their baby will be born with a low birthweight to the same risk as women who never smoked.
  

• Pregnant women who quit smoking even in the first trimester reduce their risk to the same levels as if they had not smoked during pregnancy at all.

• People who quit smoking before age 50 have half the risk of dying in the next 15 years compared to people who continue to smoke.

• Even if you already have one smoking-related ailment such as heart disease or one form of cancer, quitting smoking can reduce your risk of contracting another smoking-related ailment, or it can reduce the virulence of the disease you already have.

Finally, most former smokers tried to quit and returned to smoking several times before they were able to quit successfully over the long term. This means that if you've quit and returned to smoking, you've gone through one of your quitting cycles and you're that much closer to making the next time you quit, the one that sticks for good.

Never stop quitting smoking.

Sources
CDC, Within 20 Minutes of Quitting poster
CDC, Benefits of Quitting poster
State of New York Department of Health, The Truth About Cigarettes: Break Loose!
Antonia C. Novello et al., US Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control, The Health Benefits of Smoking Cessation: a report of the Surgeon General, 1990 (this pdf file is huge, weighing in at 627 pages).

Apple #117: Synchronized Menstruation

A while back now, 3d asked:

I don't know if this an unappropriate subject or not, but my wife would like to know why a woman's cycle will change when with different groups of women. Perhaps there's really no explanation for this.

Some brief investigation into this question pulled up some interesting research. Or anyway, I found it pretty fascinating. I always wondered about this. I had heard that maybe the moon had something to do with it, but people's menstrual cycles didn't necessarily seem to match with the full moon, so I didn't think that was it. Turns out, it's scent that does it.

• Scientists have studied women who live together, say in dorms, and also women who just socialize without necessarily sharing living quarters, and they have found that their cycles synchronize after a couple months. This synchronization is now sometimes called "the McClintock effect" after Martha McClintock, Professor of Biopsychology at the University of Chicago, who first studied and wrote about this phenomenon.
  
• Not everybody is equally sensitive to synchronization. Some women's cycles don't change at all, and some women's cycles jump 12 days to match the cycles of others around them.
  
• Scientists also studied menstrual cycles of rats and found that rats also synched up even when they were in separate rooms. The rooms, however, were connected by a shared airflow. This suggested an airborne influence at work.
• To determine what the airborne influence could be, Dr. McClintock studied the effect of pheromones on women's menstrual cycles. She had women bathe, then use an alcohol wipe under their arm and turn and wipe the cloth on the upper lip of the next woman. Sounds kind of gross, but you know, it's all for science. She said there wasn't a strong odor at all, and all the women in the study thought they were in the control group.
• The results of this study found that not only did the women's cycles synch up, but by timing when they wiped each other relative to certain points in the cycles, they could shorten everybody's cycles or lengthen them.
• While further research has corroborated that pheromones from other women influence the synchronization of their menstrual cycles, as far as I've found, no one has yet isolated the particular pheromone, or chemical scent, that triggers the shift in ovulation. In other words, there's no spray that you can go out and buy and squirt on a bunch of women, or female animals, to get them all ovulating on the same date.
  
• As far as why synchronization happens, that's another matter. I've discovered from doing these Apples that while science can verify whether or not something happens the way we think it does, science often has a very hard time explaining why it happens. And the reasons why women's cycles influence each other are still entirely speculative. But the possiblities Dr. McClintock and others have offered essentially boil down to this:
• When women are ovulating, other women's bodies could take this as a signal that it is a good time for them to be fertile. A prepubescent girl, for example, may pick up the signal that now is a good time for her body to start ovulating. An adult woman may get the signal from other women who are currently pregnant that now is a good time to get pregnant. In other words, if other women's bodies are going through and surviving this expenditure of energy, then there must be enough food available, the weather is benign, there will be other women available to assist, and so on.
  
• Another possibility is that if all the females in a group are ovulating at the same time, that would make it more difficult for a dominant male to go around and impregnate every single one of them, thus making it more likely that the male who gets the female pregnant is more available to support its offspring. Therefore, a woman's body will do its best to synch up with the ovulation cycles of other women as a way to protect their potential offspring.
  
• Elsewhere, however, Dr. McClintock says that menstrual synchrony may serve no particular function at all. Thanks a lot.

Hope that helps, Wife of 3d!

I think that, since nobody has added any new requests in a while, we'll call the requests finished for now. Thanks to everybody who posted a question! You've helped make this blog even more interesting and informative for lots of other people.

Sources
Radio National, The Health Report with Norman Swan, "Menstrual Synchrony," June 8, 1998
Martha K. McClintock, "Whither menstrual synchrony?" Annual Review of Sex Research, 1998
Morofushi et al., "Positive Relationship between Menstrual Synchrony and Ability to Smell 5alpha-Androst-16-en-3alpha-ol," Chemical Senses, 2000
"Period living," NewScientist.com, December 14, 2002

Apple #46: Soap

SOAP

So I was about to wash the dishes, and I thought, "How does soap work, anyway?" I have a dim idea that it somehow traps dirt so that you can then rinse it away, but is this idea correct, and how does the trapping part happen? And does it really get rid of the dirt, or am I just falling prey to some stupid, enormous ad campaign? And is dish soap that much different from hand soap, and shampoo, and laundry detergent, and all the rest?

• Soap works essentially by combining things with opposite natures. All soap is made of an acid plus a base. The acid is a fat, which is often a combination of a fatty acid and a triglyceride. The base is sodium hydroxide. When you mix the acid and the base together, the fat part splits, separating the fatty acids from the triglycerides. The fatty acids then combine with the hydroxides. All this, by the way, makes a kind of salt. Yes, soap is really a salt.
• The process of cleaning is easiest to understand if you think of soap molecules as having a head and a tail. The head part of the soap is the triglycerides, which attract and hold onto water. The tail part of the soap is the fatty acids, which don't like water. Dirt and grime don't like water either.
• When you run soap under water, the head of each soap molecule attracts and clings to water. When you rub the wet soap over dirt, the dirt will cling to the fatty acids because they're both in agreement that they don't like water. So now the tail and the dirt are clinging to each other, but at the same time, the head of the molecule is holding onto water.
• When you pour more water over the whole thing, the head of the molecule with the water on it goes right along with the other water, and even though the tail and the dirt would otherwise not budge, it's too late for them, they are connected to the head of the molecule, and they are carried off with it.

Antibacterial soaps

• The same process applies to bacteria. That is, regular old soap will also snag and carry off bacteria in the same way.
• Antibacterial soaps, which are supposed to be that much better, really aren't. They do have an extra agent in them that is designed to kill bacteria. However, you have to wash your hands for at least two minutes for these agents to work, and most people don't want to spend two minutes scrubbing their hands.
• You also don't want to kill every single type of bacteria on your hands. Some bacteria can be helpful. And bacteria can develop a resistance to antibacterials, which means that new strains of the bacteria could no longer be killed by the antibacerials. So if you do manage to kill the bacteria in the first place, you might actually be causing more problems.
• Also, some of the germy things on your hands are viruses, not bacteria. Antibacterial agents will not kill viruses.
• The upshot is, washing your hands thoroughly with regular soap will accomplish the same level of benefit, without the possibility of creating uber-bacteria.

Other soaps

• Soaps can be calibrated, so to speak, depending on how you'll use it. Soaps that will be used on your body are made to be milder than those that will clean things that are not on your body. And if you're not going to touch it at all, soap can be made as harsh as it needs to be, to get the job done.
• So, yes, you will get better results if you use dish soap on dishes and shampoo on your hair. If you use shampoo on your dishes, for example, your dishes might not get so clean.

Improved soap

• The fatty acids in soaps can cause problems. Some of them don't link up to the molecule chain, and because they don't like water, it can be hard to rinse them away. When the fatty acids won't rinse away, you get soap scum. This is what gives you a ring in your bathtub, a film that dulls your hair, or a gradual graying of your clothes. If you have hard water, which contains extra minerals, the fatty acids will cling to those to form more salts, which basically means the soap scum is even worse.
• So it's essentially soap scum that's led chemists to experiment with all kinds of synthetic building blocks for soap to work as effectively as possible, depending on what type of surface you're trying to clean, what kind of dirt you're trying to get rid of, and what's already in your water.
• Another reason chemists have added synthetic items is to give soap some extra benefits, many of which we take for granted but which are really not things that soap will do. If your soap does any of the following things, it's because somebody's added an extra something, which means it is technically no longer soap but a synthetic detergent, and which also means that the manufacturer has to list the ingredients on the package:
• deodorizes
• moisturizes
• is an antiperspirant
• fights acne
• cures dandruff
• gives a clean, fresh scent
• makes you more attractive

Oh, and by the way, before all this experimenting started, soap used to be made from animal fats and wood ashes.

And yes, my dishes are still waiting for me to wash them. Although the dirt, which hates water, is very glad I have not yet washed them...

Sources
Howstuffworks, "Is antibacterial soap any better than regular soap?"
Poison Ivy, Oak, & Sumac Information Center, How soaps work
About.com, How Does Soap Clean?
US Food and Drug Administration, Office of Cosmetics and Colors Fact Sheet, "Soap," February 3, 1995