Getting Head Lice Is Not The End Of The World

On the misery scale where one is a mosquito bite and ten would be a yeast infection, head lice rates about a four. Getting bit by dog or cat fleas is far more annoying and far more painful. Pet fleas are also harder to eliminate than head lice or body lice. Although there is a very high creepiness factor in head lice treatment, you get used to the idea very quickly, because you don’t have any other choice.

Symptoms

The first clues that give away the presence of head lice is not itchiness, as is commonly thought. It's finding black specks on your fingertips and under your fingers whenever you either run them through your hair or do manage to give the odd scratch as you would normally do throughout the course of the day. Those black specks are head lice droppings. You might also find these smudged on your pillow if you never scratch your head.

The next clue will be in the hair that you normally shed. The strands will not just consist of hair. Somewhere along the strand, usually about halfway down, is a teardrop-shaped hard round thing. That thing is a head lice egg. Don’t just let the strand of hair drop onto the floor. Throw it in the trash or burn it.

And then your head starts to really itch. You can't help but scratch, even though you know the head lice will be waving at you from underneath your fingernails as a result. Things are really bad when you see the adult louses crawling down the strands of your hair to fly off and make their fortunes.

Getting Rid Of Them

Head lice are one of the easier itchy conditions you can successfully treat. First, you should wash your hair, making sure every strand is saturated. This will drown most of the adults. To get the rest, you need to thoroughly coat your hair with at least half a bottle of any hair conditioner you can get a hold of. This suffocates the rest of the adult louses. Leave it on for about ten minutes, then comb your hair with a nit comb, then rinse.

Put all of your bedding and sleepwear into the dryer (washing isn't necessary) and run them through for ten minutes. That's all it will take to kill the eggs laying about. You also need to go buy and use a nit comb and over the counter head lice medications, which do a good job killing your tiny hitch hikers. Have everyone in your family use it.