this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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It's not really an opinion, bidets are associated with abnormal vaginal flora and preterm birth.
Your linked study is done with 212 subjects. 212!
With a population that small, you can have any conclusion you'd like. There are billions of people who use bidet showers daily in the world, your study has 212!
If you believe in the scientific method, you should know that a study has to be verified by many independent studies with big enough data samples before it is accepted as fact. You must surely know that there are studies that conclude that the climate change is a hoax. But the overwhelmingly majority makes these handful outliers or flawed studies.
Sigh, I was wondering if this particular misunderstanding of statistics had migrated from reddit to here.
No, you cannot dismiss a study because it "only" has 212 people. 200 people is enough to get an 85% confidence level.
On top of that, it is hardly the only study showing vaginal microflora alteration in bidet users:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21058441/
I get there is a cult of bidet users who will hear no slander of them, but it's not going to make me spray water from my toilet seat and around my vulva and potentially into my vagina. You are not changing my mind on this and I invite you to read more about sample sizes if you want to do something productive: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6970301/
Your first study has even used women who had admitted to the hospital and therefore used the shared hospital toilet bidets. I think this fact alone would make it enough to disqualify it.
Apart from hospital bidet being a one extra germ filled surface the patient touches, it raises the following questions. Was there a problem with the brand of bidet used in the hospital that might cause more of an uncontrolled spray? Did the particular toilet bowl shape contribute to the result? Non of these stays the same within the general population and any outliers would be cancelled out in a huge dataset.