Mr. Rawles,
I have read and enjoyed your blog for some time now and thank you for it daily.
Regarding the recent post on control of head lice, I have found simple light cooking oil to be startlingly effective. Massaged through the afflicted’s hair and scalp and left for a few hours the oil is meant to suffocate the lice and eggs. I have used this several times, once I needed to repeat the processes to be effective, but in most previous infestations, once was enough.
This treatment can be made apparently more effective by including some Tea Tree oil in the mix. Hope this helps, – Regards, JeMe.
Jim:
I keep getting such great info that I would not usually think of. Thank God that your readers are thinkers as well. Regarding, the letter dealing with uninvited guests I saw in my local Florida newspaper about using Listerine for lice. It reportedly works the first time. SurvivalBlog readers should do Internet searches on herbal or all natural cures for dealing with these uninvited guests, for the pets as well. Thank you for the web site. – Dawn
James,
With reference to “Dealing with Uninvited Guests”, there is an easy way to get rid of head lice. Using copious amounts of cheap hair conditioner on hair, then leaving it in, stops the nits from being able to cling on to the hair shaft. You must comb it through well to ensure every hair is coated. Once they drop off they don’t survive long without a host (a matter of hours). You need to treat the whole family otherwise it just passes on the problem. When my daughter was young, we spent a small fortune on head lice products and nit combs, until my local hairdresser told me about the conditioner trick.
To help prevent infestations, add a couple of drops of tea tree oil to a final hair rinse.
Blessings and prayers for your Memsahib, – Luddite Jean
JWR:
I have “been there, done that” with head lice and my daughter. Toxic concoctions like “Rid,” “Kwell,” etc are costly and worthless. When my daughter was 8 years old she would come home from school scratching her head. We finally figured out it was head lice. I went on internet and read up and decided that getting “Rid” or some Permethrin based solution would be best so we tried it. The lice would just swim around in the “killer” liquid on my daughter’s scalp. We tried another brand with Lindane and the same result. Be aware that many of the “Lice Information” web sites are fronts for a particular (useless) product. I went back to the internet where there were many “kook” solutions like suffocating the lice in olive oil – what a waste of olive oil. There were other “green” concoctions which were designed to suffocate or poison (naturally) the head lice. I concluded that all the kook remedies were worthless and were debunked on most of the mainstream web sites as worthless – good luck trying to suffocate the nits and adult lice. It really drove me mad to think of my beautiful daughter with her beautiful long hair having “bugs” crawling around on her head. I wanted them dead and I wanted them dead now. I was desperate. Then I read some where about merely using plain old hair conditioner – i.e. putting it on after a shower in copious amounts and leaving it in – and mechanically removing the noxious lice with a metal nit comb. I was tired of poisoning my daughter (read the labels – it is poison) and from what I read the prescription medication was way more toxic. So we tried it – we bought two quality metal nit combs and slathered on the hair conditioner and carefully followed the instructions that came with the nit combs. We mechanically removed the nits and the live adult head lice. You get a cup of hot water and dunk the nit comb and watch the “body count” of the adult lice add up. It is satisfying to physically remove them one by one. After two days there were no more adult lice to be found. The nits were another matter and for the next couple days we went through my daughter’s hair strand by strand and pulled out each nit with our finger nails as the nit combs were ineffective in removing all the nits. It took a total of three to four hours over the course of three or four days to remove the adult lice and all the nits. Victory – free at last. A few months later when we found the early stages of a new infestation we knocked it down quickly in just two days.
Another aspect of this is the extensive instructions on the web sites and written instructions about how to treat bedding etc. If you followed all the recommendations you would spend hours on decontamination and spray toxic poisons around the bed and house. Thankfully. head lice can only live in hair/scalp otherwise they die fairly quickly. We found that merely washing the pillow case and sheets was sufficient without spraying poison in the carpet and all over the place another bad toxic idea. I shudder when I remember one of the coaches of my daughter’s baseball team spraying lice “killer” in the batting helmets and when I asked it was because of widespread lice in the local school. Nice. My daughter had her own helmet and we told all the other kids it was only for my daughter to use. Notes: Where we went wrong – we took our daughter to her pediatrician early on to have her head checked out and we told that the nits were old and there was no current problem. Wrongo bongo. The full blown outbreak occurred days later. We called back to request the heavy duty prescription medication and were told to try the over the counter stuff as the prescription medication was really toxic and they only prescribe it when absolutely necessary. Lice have adapted and have developed immunity to the over the counter medication so aside from it being toxic it is worthless and expensive – I saw this with my own eyes. I tried it over and over – to the limits on the warning instructions. Also, when you go on the Internet you read a bunch of politically correct nonsense about how kids who spread head lice are not “dirty and unkempt” but some parent(s) at my daughter’s school were sending a kid(s) to school with head lice – It’s not the kid’s fault but I disagree, the parents were dirty, inconsiderate slobs in my opinion.
So, bottom line – get two or more quality nit combs, slather on the (non-toxic) hair conditioner, follow the combing instructions and remove the adult lice and as many nits as possible and then physically remove all the remaining nits one by one with your finger nails as those nits really glue themselves to the hair. Carefully dispose of the adult nits you remove – I treat them as if they were black plague contagions – and wash the bedding every day until you don’t find any more adult lice and have removed all the nits. Mechanical removal has several advantages – it is non-toxic, it uses common hair conditioner (easily stored), it is inexpensive, and most importantly it works. It may be the only method that actually works. In a true survival situation you could substitute olive oil or some other similar substance in place of the hair conditioner. Hopefully we will never have to deal with the problem again but all the dread is gone and we are equipped, once and for all to deal with this problem because we have lots of hair conditioner and three quality nit combs. Simple solution – the best solution – Keep is simple.
On another note, I just finished reading “Patriots”