Ich treatment gone haywire!!

[nursie]

Soooo..what bad effects have you read about using salt to treat ICH? I'm interested to hear about this. If you do it right and take your time to add the full dose to your tank you avoid the only negative effect I can think of which relates to change in osmolality.

 

[daveedka]

It's never a good idea to put copper in the tank with any living organism including fish. Yes coppersafe will kill your ich, as Copper is pretty much toxic to everything at high levels. Coppersafe as it's called is close to impossible to effectively remove, and has the potential to break down in the tank and poison your fish slowly. It may not irritate the skin and cause visible damage like malechite or others, but it is no less harmful to your fish, and far more harmful to other organisms such as snails and crustaceans.


There are many many effective ICH meds that will work, none of them will work any faster than any others. ICh dictates how fast it dies, and although you may have killed it with toxic copper in the tank (Which as you said doesn't leave the tank), it didn't die in four days.
As TKOS said there really aren't any negative side effects to salt as there are to copper, so it would still be far superior in most peoples opinion.

Soooo..what bad effects have you read about using salt to treat ICH? I'm interested to hear about this.

I'm interested as well. Short term salt use for treatment has no negatives that I know of. Long term use is a bit of a different situation, but short term salt does a fine job with no real side effects at all.
Dave