Lice, while often associated with uncleanliness, are actually fastidiously-minded insects, meaning they would prefer to be on clean heads instead of dirty ones. If you suddenly find that you have a lot of scalp-itching in your home, your initial reaction might be to scrub the daylights out of all of the itching heads in the house. Before you get too carried away, it is actually a better and healthier idea to perform a lice check, since use of lice shampoo and other anti-lice products can contribute to poison-resistant pests later on. Here is a guide to performing a lice check at home, and what less toxic products you can use to remove nits (lice eggs) when and if you find any.
Be Prepared to Comb Through a Lot of Hair
When checking for lice, you will have to part and comb through a lot of hair. Since you do not want to transfer any of the adult lice or nymphs from one head to the next, wear rubber/surgical gloves and be sure to change the gloves every time you finish inspecting a household member's head. Buy either a lice comb, which can help remove some of the bugs and nits, or a rattail comb, which is often easier for some people to use if they do not have any experience parting hair. Next, wrap a towel around each household member's shoulders, and then remember to tightly bag the towel when the lice check is complete and lice have been found. (The towel will have to be washed in bleach and the hottest wash setting to kill anything that fell onto the towel.)
Parting and Combing Through the Hair
Every head you check should start with all of their hair flipped forward because lice like to migrate and hang out around the head's hotspots (e.g., the back of the neck, behind the ears, etc.). For boys and girls with short hair, a lice check will go very quickly because they do not have a whole lot of hair to part. Using the rattail comb's handle or the lice comb, begin at the base of the neck and part the hair in very thin layers, looking for anything silvery or whitish that moves. If you think you spot something, use the comb to scrape it or tap it. A bug will move, and dandruff flakes will fly up. Continue parting the hair in very thin horizontal layers from the nape of the neck to the forehead and from side to side behind the ears until you have combed through and checked the entire head of each and every house member.
Non-toxic Products for Removing Nits
The telltale nits you are looking for are small, silvery dots that will be stuck to hair shafts on the head. You could spend hours trying to pull the nits out (and that definitely hurts because of the bio-glue lice use to stick the nits to the hair shafts), or you could use some common household products to remove them more easily. Rubbing hair shafts with a daub of vegetable oil is just enough to make the nits come unglued, since they can only stick to clean hair. You can also use mayo and cover your entire head with it, then wrap your head with plastic wrap to suffocate some of the adult insects and cause the nits to slide off the hair shafts (be sure to comb through your mayo-saturated hair right before washing so that the nits go down the drain with the mayo).
Share26 April 2016
When was the last time you went to an optometrist? If you are like most people, you only go when your glasses break or you run out of contact lenses. Very few people actually follow the guidelines of having their eyes checked each year. Not sure why it is necessary to visit your optometrist each year? You can learn all about the different exams and tests that your optometrist runs and why they are done. Knowing what can go wrong with your eyes and what can be done if the ailments are detected early could help to encourage you to get to the optometrist more often.
