circumspecktor

I would just like to mention that most sexually transmitted infections don't present with symptoms, so many people wouldn't know that they even have something. Chlamydia is asymptomatic in 70% of women and 50% of men, Gonorrhea is asymptomatic in 50% of both genders. Syphilis may cause a lesion, but its painless and often not noticed by the person who has it. It goes away after a few weeks, then no symptoms. HIV seroconversion illness presents as a mild to severe flu like illness, so again no obvious signs of STI.

The only way to know is to get tested! Even then, syphilis and HIV have a window period of up to 3 months after infection where it might not show up on the blood test.

Stay safe friends :)

Thank you! This was a dramatically better answer than anything OP has posted in this entire thread :)

There's quite a few of us in the thread who don't want to lucid dream anymore but can't figure out how to stop.

We don't deliberately do anything to induce it or to practice it, so there's no habits to stop doing like the OP has repeatedly suggested. He's just said that "it's simple", and to just not practice the skill and it will go away on its own, which obviously isn't true.

Do you know of any methods to prevent lucid dreaming?

I test people for HSV infections as part of my job. Unfortunately the blood testing is all but useless, it doesn't really tell us anything helpful and more often will just cause emotional distress in the patient. Up to 80% of the population will test positive for HSV in a blood test, mainly because so many of us were kissed on a face by great aunt agnes as a child and got a mild cold sore once. I've had one in my life as a little kid, which means my antibody blood test would show positive. It isn't something I worry about at all, I don't consider myself as having herpes.

I will only test a person for HSV via a swab of the site. If I swab a spot on a persons genitals and it shows HSV, they have genital herpes. If they've never had a genital lesion, I suggest they rest easy and continue with regular skin self exams. I can also usually identify HSV just by looking at it, but I'll swab in order to let them know if its 1 or 2 and provide the appropriate education.

Not OP, but this may be a "safe supply" approach. We're doing the same thing because the supply lines of illicit substances has been so disrupted due to covid that it's often safer to just prescribe people a safe supply of these meds then have them continuing to use illicit substances off the street.

We had a bunch of unexpected ODs and ER visits last year related to tainted benzos and tainted crack. Quite a few clients have managed to kick their crack/cocaine addiction with prescribed stimulants, which some may argue is just replacing one addiction for another but the damage done from inhaling fentanyl laced crack is def worse than taking addies. Everyone we've given safe supply benzos to haven't had any other unexpected results show up in their drug tests either, just what we're prescribing instead of the mishmash of random substances and designer drugs they used to have. No ER visits or ODs in our client population since we took this approach and quite a few have had great success getting more structure in their lives (less crime, less sex work, less homelessness), so we're calling it a win so far.

ETA: there isn't really much evidence to support this approach and no decent guidelines. it's definitely not standard practice but the concept is gaining steam in addiction medicine. It's more of a desperate times call for desperate measures situation, don't want anyone getting the idea that this is recommended or a normal thing.