Home Remedies for Treating Head Lice

For most parents, head lice are an all-too-frequent problem because children seem to spread lice around much more often than adults do. It’s not odd to hear that there’s a lice infestation at your child’s school, whereas if you heard the same announcement about your office, you’d probably be more than a little bit surprised!

One of the resulting thoughts that parents have about this frequency of lice infestation is that pharmacological anti-lice shampoos are not a good way to get rid of lice. Many parents, especially of today, believe that if it’s not natural, it shouldn’t be eaten or worn by a child.

Shampoos

Of course, some people are more extreme about this than others, but in the case of products that contain chemicals, it’s very understandable that parents are not interested in using anti-lice shampoo with their children time and time again as they get infested and re-infested with head lice from other children around them.

Anti-lice shampoos only kill live lice, so if these shampoos are the only way that you are treating a lice infestation, chances are pretty good that the treatment will not be very successful.

Mayonnaise and Vinegar

In order to really treat lice, you’ve got to also remove all of the egg sacks (sometimes called nits) in addition to killing the live lice. One way to do this is to smear your child’s head with mayonnaise or dippity-do (ask the parent of a child who dances what this hair gel is) and leave the product on over night.

In the morning, as you try to get the product out, you will invariably remove most of the nits as well as the mayonnaise or hair goop. Some alternative health specialists claim that the mayonnaise of gel kills the live lice, but there’s no real proof for this yet, but at least it’s known that getting the product out will involve also removing the nits living in your child’s hair. Other products that you can try are olive oil and, some say, vinegar.

How To

If you would like to try one of these home remedies, simply layer the product on thickly, very liberally, both onto the scalp and the entire length of your child’s hair. Then you should gather all of their hair into a shower cap and have them sleep on it.

Make sure to leave yourselves lots of extra time in the morning because you’ll need it in order to get out all that sticky goop. Some people swear by tea tree oil as an effective lice killer. Since it is an essential oil, it is not tested by the FDA either for safety or for effectiveness.

For this reason, you should steer clear of ‘natural’ remedies from the health foods store; natural doesn’t always mean safe. The home remedy method listed above is not proven to work 100% of the time, but it is completely safe, though not too appealing, to smear your child’s head with mayonnaise, for that reason you have nothing to lose. Give it a try if you’re so inclined.