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Tick protection
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4wanderingeyes
5 year old buck +
I went in and told them I had been biten by a deer tick. The dr said my choice was to get tested, and it takes several weeks, and the tests arent always accurate, or just take the antibiotic Doxycycline. I told him my insurance doesnt cover medications, and he said the prescription is like $5. It was a no brainer for me, I took the medication. I never did get tested, but it was about 2 weeks after the tick bit me, and I started getting bad headaches. They went away within a week after the meds, for the most part.
useyourbow
A good 3 year old buck
This^^^^^^ If not pick up some Sawyers tick spray. I have sat turkey hunting and watched ticks actually tip over backwards off by pant legs. Works for skitters as well. I have one set of deer woods work clothes I treat very four weeks. My turkey vest and camo gets treated once prior to season along with all my warm season deer hunting clothes.
+1 on the Doxycycline for use if you have a tick that has attached itself to you. My Doctor is very proactive in these cases. Once I had a bullseye rash to go with the tick bite. I got a 7 day course of the meds and it kept me from developing lyme disease.
I also have a friend that it took 2-3 years for him to get diagnosed with lyme disease. He suffered greatly in the interval.
I also have a friend that it took 2-3 years for him to get diagnosed with lyme disease. He suffered greatly in the interval.
Bowsnbucks
5 year old buck +
^^^^^ Yep. I had one on me a couple years ago and the Dr. gave me 10 days of Doxycycline as a pro-active measure. All good info here guys. Thanks for posting / sharing !!! Let's not get bitten.
When I'm not planting trees and hunting I dabble in being a physician, so I think my opinion on this is somewhat qualified......
For prevention/prophylaxis the CDC recommends a one-time dose of doxycycline 200mg (twice the typical dose). If you have had a tick on you for LESS than 24 hours, your risk of disease is very, very low. If greater than 24 hours and/or the tick is imbedded/engorged, consider a one-time dose as an alternative to a full two or three week course.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
I have some kind of reactive arthritis that started in my early 30s. I had a tick exposures but no characteristic bullseye. The first test they run is usually a titer. It is not very accurate. The next test they ran was the western blot. It is a somewhat more accurate test. They repeated the tests several times and the results flip flopped back and forth. The word borderline was used a lot.
In the end, it didn't matter much. My doctor was smart enough to get me on a course of doxycycline even before the tests came back. Rheumatologist put me on a variant called minocycline for a fairly long period. While that seemed to help with the acute period, it did not fully resolve things. Reactive arthritis is really a classification of arthritis where your body reacts to some pathogen that is close enough in cell structure to your connective tissue that the antibodies produced attack your own cells. The spirochete associated with Lyme disease is just one possible pathogen. In general, the chronic portion of the disease is pretty much managed the same, so regardless of the pathogen.
I won't make medical recommendations for others, but for me, tick exposure where the tick is not removed properly and soon after attachment dictates a course of doxycycline regardless of any testing.
Thanks,
Jack
Tap
5 year old buck +
I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis in 2012. My wife began an extensive search understand the cause of R.A.
She found a book titled "The Road Back" written in 1988 by Dr Thomas Brown. He was convinced that RA was caused by pathogens exactly like you describe, Jack. He believed RA could be successfully treated with long-term antibiotic dosage. However, most Rheumatologists think that is hogwash. We tried to find a doctor that would prescribe the antibiotics...no luck.
Like I said earlier, Lyme disease can mimic over 300 diseases which can be almost impossible to diagnose.
I believe that there are a lot of sick people that have been misdiagnosed as having other diseases.
SW. Pa.
"For prevention/prophylaxis the CDC recommends a one-time dose of doxycycline 200mg (twice the typical dose). If you have had a tick on you for LESS than 24 hours, your risk of disease is very, very low. If greater than 24 hours and/or the tick is imbedded/engorged, consider a one-time dose as an alternative to a full two or three week course.''
This is exactly what my Doctor asked me when I had a tick attached. Was it on longer than 24 hours? When I answered yes, he prescribed me the antibiotics mentioned above. This happened a few years ago and I am glad my Doctor was up to speed on ticks and lyme disease.
This is exactly what my Doctor asked me when I had a tick attached. Was it on longer than 24 hours? When I answered yes, he prescribed me the antibiotics mentioned above. This happened a few years ago and I am glad my Doctor was up to speed on ticks and lyme disease.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
When I first had the issue and did some research, they had made no correlation between Rheumatoid arthritis and pathogens that I could find. However there was an entire class of arthritis that they thought was somehow related to pathogen reactions. Interesting that some now think that extends to RA. Most of the time, folks outside the mainstream of medicine end up being heretics, but there are always a few that with hindsight, folks now recognize were prophets.
As for my personal experience, when it first hit me, I was walking around like an 80 year old man barely making it from bench to bench in the mall as my wife would shop. I ended up on a long-term course of minocycline. After a month or so, I was back to my old self playing competitive basketball and other sports again. After a year or so, my Rheumatologist thought he saw the beginnings of a pigmentation change in my skin and decided to take me off of it. Within two weeks, significant symptoms returned. After 6 months, I convinced him to put me back on it. He did, but it was completely ineffective the second time. While the chronic symptoms are not as bad as the acute period, I've been managing the symptoms ever since. Fortunately, I have not gone beyond NSAIDs yet to immunosuppressive drugs.
So, what happened? Did taking me off the minocycline allow the pathogen to mutate to become resistant? Was it simply the anti-inflammatory effect of the minocycline that relieving symptoms during that period? Was the sharp decline in symptoms after going on minocycline followed by the return after I got off, simply coincidental with a natural wave in the disease? I'll probably never know.
One thing I'm sure of is that there is an autoimmune component to the disease. Every time I now get a common bacterial infection of any type, I get increased arthritic symptoms a week or so before the bacterial infection becomes apparent.
Hope things go well with your RA!
Jack
4wanderingeyes
5 year old buck +
So what is the best way to treat dogs with Permethrin, and how often do they need to be treated? Just spray them down with the diluted .5% mixture every couple weeks? Spray them down entirely, except their faces? Also if you spray them down with Permethrin, then do you not need to treat them with Frontline?
Tap
5 year old buck +
I'm not really sure of the answer but I do know that the concentrate that I got from Tractor Supply had some dilution rates for various applications on the bottle. Animals and structures were 2 of the uses. I didn't study the instructions for animal use. But as someone posted earlier...permethrin can kill cats, so apparently, not all animals are created equally when it comes to using permethrin. Be careful.
SW. Pa.
4wanderingeyes
5 year old buck +
After reading the instructions, it is a mixture of .05% to use on dogs, not .5%. So I will just premix one spray bottle at .05% and mark it for dogs, and another at .5 for spraying clothing. It does say it will kill cats, and bees, along with spiders, ants, and pretty much all insects and pests. Lice, bedbugs, as well.
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Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Someday isle
5 year old buck +
Last summer my neighbor asked me why I always wear the same clothes when I'm in the woods working. I have a pair of carhartt pants and a couple of vented fishing shirts that I wear when the weathers nice. I told him those were the ones I treated with the spray. I'm going out tomorrow to change camera cards, replace batteries and hunt for some mushrooms. After this thread I was motivated to respray my work clothes. Thanks for the reminder.
Tap
5 year old buck +
There have been some fairly technical posts in this thread and sometimes it's easy to gloss over long posts and miss some info.
But there's one take-home, common gem of wisdom in a lot of the posts...Lyme Disease can ruin your life and permethrin is the best tick-bite prevention. GET SOME AND USE IT. And if you don't feel like treating your clothes, then buy some of the clothing that I mentioned in the early post.
SW. Pa.
I agree
Beyond preventing them climbing on you, I also recommend following a post-woods routine. For me, every day when I come inside I strip completely and turn in a circle in front of the bathroom mirror before I get in the shower. Those buggers like to hide, you have to be vigilant to find them and following a routine helps imo.
It's kind of counter intuitive but I actually find it easier to prevent them from latching on during the years and times that they are bad since I'm constantly reminded of their presence and therefore constantly looking for them. I think it's easier for one to sneak by in the middle of the winter when I tend not to be thinking as much about them.
4wanderingeyes
5 year old buck +
Back to using Permethrin on dogs. If I use the Permethrin once a month on them, would I need to use Front line on them as well? My guess is I wouldnt.
yoderjac
5 year old buck +
That is one brand of the stuff. I started using that aerosol form to spray my hunting coveralls when I was hunting spring gobbler. I've since found that permethrin is great for spraying fruit trees. It seems to be just as effective for most of the problematic insects I have and seems to last significantly longer than Sevin before another application is required. So, I started buying the liquid concentrated form. I use a garden or backpack sprayer depending on the application. In addition to trees and hunting clothing, I also spray the inside of my permanent blinds and shooting houses. For some reason wasps in particular have an affinity for building nests in my permanent blinds. Once sprayed, wasps avoid building nests for several months. It is significantly less expensive in this form.
Thanks,
Jack
Thanks,
Jack
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