Treatments via water VS Treatments via food

[Loopy]

I had a chat a while ago with an aquarium club member about treating fish for various nasties and we talked about different ways of getting treatments into the fish.

i know the most common way to treat a fish is to just chuck your medication into the tank water and cross your fingers.

There is the method of a making up a concentrated solution in a container and putting the fish in for a short amount of time.

A more fiddly way is to take the fish out of the water and apply treatment. For open wounds and external ailments, treatment is dabbed on or i have heard of injecting under the skin. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds. Fish don't really like being out of the water and don't sit still when you ask them to.

The thing that interested me and stuck in my mind when i had this discussion was the idea of getting medication inside a fish. I have thought about this and when i recently had one of my emperor tetra females start to get big fluffy white tufts all over her body and look a bit miserable i thought i would be a good opportunity to try out an idea i had.

i soaked flake food in the treatment that i usually feed those fish. It probably is not an original idea but it was a new one for me.

My theory was that providing the fish was in the mood to eat, it would be getting a better dose of the medication, and we humans take most medications orally. i just used a drop or two of melafix and a few drops of masterpet "spot off" to a dish of food. I also thought that i surely can't hurt the fish to eat a treatment that would be in their water.

No one has died from it yet and the emperor girl has healed up really well and fast! so i am going to try this on anyone else that i see looking unwell just incase it was a fluke.

I would be interested to hear of if anyone else tries this and how it works. And just other peoples methods of treating unwell fishys

[sharn]

for external problems i will treat via water, for internal problems i will try my best to treat via food. for example hex- it is best to feed the meds as it goes straight to the gut where the problem is but it can be treated by water (which is normally used if the fish have stopped eating).

im not sure if eating meds would hurt them, it depends on the meds i suppose, via water enters the bloodstream right? does eating it do the same thing (into the bloodstream)?. treating internally for a external problem seems like it might take longer but on the other hand might be more effective- im not up on how the meds work :lol: