30 Killing diatoms isn’t the most important thing right now. The largest problem I’m having is that the discus aren’t eating and one of them, when it isn’t swimming, seems to be in a perpetual headstand.
Discus not eating isn’t an unusual thing. They’ll essentially refuse to eat if they get any number of diseases, especially intestinal parasites, of which they can be easily prone to if they’re stressed.
When I found the fish, they were dark and seriously sick, both of them crammed into those little 8 gallon tanks they sell tetras and deceptively small Oscars out of at MegaPet. The lady told me they were ‘left here’ because their owner couldn’t take care of them and she wanted to know if I would adopt them.
When I got them home, the fish had such a rough time adjusting. They developed open sores on their head and it looked like they had gill flukes. They trashed about so much in the bucket I brought them home in, one of them seriously cut itself. The first cure, one that I discovered when I was in college, is a compound called tea tree oil. It does amazing stuff for fish.
The “tea tree” is an evergreen, and the medicinal oils are removed by steam distillation
. The principle compound isolated, of which some 93 are found, which seems to possess the most in vitro activity is a small terpene called terpinen-4-ol. Most scientific literature seems to focus on its fungicidal activity. My own personal experience suggests that it accelerates healing of superficial wounds – especially ulcers on the heads and body and damaged fins, though I’ve not done any controls. Apparently it has been implicated in causing bitch tits, (iirc reported in the New England Journal of Med) but I have an exceptionally hard time agreeing with their conclusions based off only 3 case reports.
But that’s just one of the various things we use to treat fish related diseases. Other, actual real fish drugs, are normal prescription human drugs that you can buy OTC if they are formulated for “fish use” or crazy toxic compounds that were never actually horribly good at treating people. Most of those will be considered in a separate post down the line, assuming drug Sunday resumes, but since I’ve dropped a pretty dime on these bad boys already, I’m aiming for inexpensive and high probability cures.
The head standing is likley due to gas trapped in the colon or an infection of the… err.. fish equivalent of the ear. It may also be a swim bladder issue, but 
I’m betting it’s intestinal parasites that are causing blockage and gas. So, the first thing I’m going to try to do is make these guys shit. Shit like mad. I never knew this, but Epsom salts are laxatives, they’re available for pennies in every organic lab in the world and every organic chemist has an occasion to use them nigh daily. Epsom is nothing but magnesium sulfate and since I have that in mass quantities, I think I’ll take a pinch home with me to give them a bit of the runs and follow it up with some metronidazole (mechanism of action is detailed in that article in there), which is actually a prodrug. The hope being that, after forcing the fish to shit out most of their intestines, the drug can effectivly kill whatever protozoan that is living in there and some of the stuff that was expelled. According to our pharmacist medchemist post-doc, metronidazole is indicated to also treat some VDs… While metronidazole is prescription only in the US, it can nevertheless be purchased (as can most 1st generation antibiotics and antifungals) OTC at some specialty fish stores… so, if you’re ever embarrassed about that clap you got, just head to the fish isle of your aquarium specialty shop. It’s a good thing they can be purchased OTC for fish, because I couldn’t find a single vet that ’sees fish.’ :\
Alternately, as a chemist, we’re fully capable of ordering most drugs without approval from PIs (BUT NOT PIPERIDINE, YOU DRUG ADDICTS), but that’s scandalous and not a very fair use of grant money. Here is a list of things you can use to make drugs and are no-nos as far as Big Brother is concerned. Notice acetone.
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whenever my fish used to float like that it usually meant they were going to be dead in a week. won’t the magnesium sulfate be more bad for them than good for them? is it a laxative for people or fish? You put all that chloramine in the water to remove magnesium remember, so i don’t think that adding more will give you the desired effect.
Yes, you generally want to remove magnesium because it’s not so good for anything in high concentrations. But that’s the nature of drug therapy. It’s frequently a compromise between simply being bad for you and being worse for whatever it is that’s making you sick. So, my assumption is that the magnesium will make them poop before it does anything else too bad to them. Besides, I thought chloramine was a product of addition of chlorine as an microbicide and an indirect consequence of that because of free amine in the water.
Then again, I’m not an ichthyologist, I just play one on the internets.
now i know.
and knowing is half the battle.
G. I. Joe
I nominate “Cotton” as the name for the Discus.
Cotton is pretty good. Apropos even, given the current inorganic medicinal regiment.
I thought you were going to say, “Apropos, given he is almost dead.”
Arklhf… I have SOME taste, man.
You can name your discus after a pontiff…
(This reminds me: “I thought I saw John Paul II today – but didn’t he die two years ago?”
“Yeah, he did – and everybody is afraid to tell him”)
Best of luck with the discus, dude. I think it sounds like you’re on the right track to nurse them back to health.
As a side note, my company is moving a cargo container full of piperidine today and it is being escorted by DEA officers! Hahah… who uses PCP anymore, anyway?
“My own personal experience suggests that it accelerates healing of superficial wounds”
Based on what? Your non-blind, non-placebo controlled experiment with a population of one? All on a mixture that contains 93 compounds?!?
Ah yes, the “science” of herbal remedies.
Well jesus fuck retard, it says right in the sentence that he’s not done any controls. If you’re going to make pointless contributions at least have the decency to do it with some humor or something.
hah.
Sorry, I edited out all the jokes before posting.
My point is the “herbal remedy” world is full of this crap. “This will cure cancer… though we’ve never tested it.” It’s as if saying “though I’ve not done any controls” justifies any wild claim. Kyle’s claim wasn’t necessarily wild, but I was surprised to see Kyle, an obviously talented chemist with above average intellect [flattery intended], saying something like this.
crap, this post doesn’t have any humor in it either.
Wait… what’s the flattery intended for?
How exactly is the “herbal remedy” world full of crap? How is it any better or worse than taking drugs for an issue? It’s really the same thing, right? Herbal remedies contain some chemical (or combination thereof) which we shall refer to as “active ingredients.” In addition to the active ingredients, there are some other things that do nothing, dub them “inactive ingredients.” Sounds much the same as prescription drugs. The only argument is that herbal remedies were found through trial and error while medications were more actively formulated towards some specific goal. That and drugs cost big bucks and herbal remedies , generally don’t. Even so, alternative uses are always found for medicines: aspirin for the heart, viagra for hypertension/Raynaud’s phenomenon, sudafed for meth… Plus, given the side effects of most medications, even the placebo effect of an herbal remedy is favorable. Given the choice between the placebo with no side effect or the medicine with the long, ungodly list of side effects (bloody stool, anyone?) you better believe I’m going to try the herbal remedy first. I’m not saying that the solution to all problems lie in an herbal remedy, just that they can’t get discounted so easily.
If you want to believe every claim made for herbal remedies, go ahead. What I wrote was “full of this crap” which was a reference to a variety of unsubstantiated claims. I’m sure you’ve come across the ads for things that claim to cure cancer, baldness, insomnia and global warming.
You’ve made the assumption that herbal remedies include “active ingredients.” How do you know there is anything active in them? What assurance do you have? And when there is an active ingredient, how do you know how much there is in each dose. The problem is that there are no standards.
I am not totally discounting herbal remedies, but I will always trust a pharmaceutical product before a herbal remedy. The placebo effect is not going to stop the cancer cells from growing in my colon.
Well, you are talking to chemists here, and we’re not stupid. One thing I’d like to point out is that herbal remedies often have minimal or no side effects since they’ve been tested in Phase III trials by your ancestors. This was pointed out to you by Todd. I have never seen a herbal remedy that claims to cure global warming, baldness, or cancer. Some for insomnia (or crying babies) actually work. However, boiling poppy seeds in tea isn’t really done anymore.
Where I grew up, there was a plant that was pointed out to me by my grandparents that had large, wide leaves. I could cut off a leaf, and apply the stuff to a cut which would take a day less to heal. You better believe that it worked. Not as good as Aloe Vera, but it worked. What do you think they teach the British version of the Marines when they get to hang out in the South American jungle on a survival exercise? Good, documented evidence exists for some “Natural Cures”. Lumping them all into the Kevin Trudeau category is disingenuous.
“I could cut off a leaf, and apply the stuff to a cut which would take a day less to heal. You better believe that it worked.”
How do you know it took a day less?
Because it took a day or two longer when I didn’t do it since I lived in the city half the year where this thing didn’t grow. I cut myself pretty much every day as a kid. Rusty metal wires in dark, abandoned basements usually were the worst. The plant made all traces of a cut (scar tissue) disappear faster. I also have about 400 years of ancestors backing me up as well and longer if you can trust the locals in that part of the world; it’s not only my own sound, scientific research.
The plant was also supposed to make it hurt a little less, but not in my experience. Probably a placebo effect.
Well, before we had aspirin we had white willow bark. And I’d point out that Taxol was pulled out of a tree. I’m not an advocate for the ‘Natural Remedies’ Commercial Machine, but I’m a chemist and I know goddamn well (as should you) that people pull biologically active shit out of plants and sea sponges every day.
Just because it came from nature doesn’t mean it isn’t worth investigating and, for whatever reason, no one is interested in spending the money to conduct double blind studies on these compounds, thus any claim about them will continue to be unsubstantiated.
In any regard, my point wasn’t to recommend or promote a certain product for a disease, but to share my experience with a formulation that I found to be effective for treating certain types of fish diseases. I justified it by stating there is current scientific evidence that supports the title compound’s ability to kill microbes. I assumed your google works as well as mine, but just in case:
http://scholar.google.com/scho.....tnG=Search
It’s as good as a po’ boy like me is going to get. If you want to fork over half a million to do a clinical trial so I can give you the voice of science behind my reasoning, go for it. Put that beer money to good use.
First of all, the beer money IS being put to good use… beer!
Second, I don’t think I have ever discounted the importance, value, activity, etc… of natural products. I’m a big fan of natural products.
My main point is that manufacturers of herbal remedies can put any claim on the bottle they want, whether it’s been tested or not. They may work. They may be the best thing on earth. But there is no guarantee that it works or that the active compound(s) is/are even present.
So, what’s your beef then? I made a claim that is partly supported with references to peer reviewed literature and partly my own anecdotal evidence. I didn’t link to the manufacturer’s website, didn’t offer to sell it, offered that my experiences can’t be taken as rigorously tested IN THE SAME SENTENCE I MADE THE CLAIM, I have no vested interest in seeing it become popular and pointed out the assumed biologically active molecule.
If you have a problem with the commercial entity that promotes garbage for the sake of money then I’m right there with you. If you have a problem with people telling each other that they believe an extract of a biological specimen works then I really have no idea what to tell you, other than you shouldn’t counter a claim with “…it’s ignorant bullshit” when you’ve done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO PROVIDE SOMETHING OF SCHOLARLY MERIT RIGHT DOWN TO JUST GOOGLING TO DEBUNK IT. If you do, it would be easily to compare the validity of the experiments and it would be a genuine debate. ‘Till then, your claims are justifiably lumped in with the rest of the quackery.
It’s unavoidably true that ignorantly calling shenanigans is just as pathological as believing everything in nature can cure you. You’ve just hopped on a bandwagon of a different color.
“If you have a problem with the commercial entity that promotes garbage for the sake of money then I’m right there with you.”
That’s one of my points. I’m glad we agree.
Now, I will throw a mea culpa out. I did what annoys me about blog comments. I admit it. I took one statement you wrote, extracted it and used it to springboard into something the statement wasn’t necessarily addressing in the first place. The guilt is tearing me apart!! OK, not really, but I hate it when people nitpick one or two statements, and now I am one of those guys. Dammit!!
The essence of what I was getting at (and I propose it in the form of a question) is: How much weight should be put on anecdotal evidence in science?
Do you have any scientific evidence to support your anecdotal evidence that tea tree oil helps heal superficial wounds on fish? And I’m not asking this to be a jerk. I’m honestly interested, and I did try this thing you call “Google.”
Finally, how do you get it on the fish? I can’t imagine that’s an easy thing to do.
There is really a lot of literature that’s quite easy to get to if you just google it on google scholar. The very first page will even give you the solubility of the purportedly active compound(s) in tea tree oil in water, which turns out to be quite good, as greasy as that molecule looks. So it’s just a matter of pouring it into the tank.
And anecdotal evidence is just evidence. I’d never risk my life or career on anecdotal evidence, but it’s a pretty damn good place to start.
Seriously, you just pour it into the water? Now that’s interesting.
Sorry to prolong this discussion.
I’ll hang up and listen.
I’m pretty sure some of the herbs “my friend” has used worked. For example, when “he” ate those poppy pods, “his” pupils disappeared, he vomited, became constipated, and he fell fast asleep for like 20 hours. And when he drank that kava powder stuff, his mouth went numb and he felt all talkative. And when he smoked that salvia extract, his legs became the blades of a spinning fan and he fell through 4 entirely alien dimensions where little elves stroked his non-corporeal body. And when he puts tea tree oil on a wound, it burns and cools and I’ll be damned if that isn’t topically killing some microbes! My point is, herbs contain drugs. Herbs are drugs in green leafy (or brown barky) packages. Many are quite active, and should not be underestimated (I’m talking to you, Mr. Poppy Pod!). Anyways, yah. =)
I am a fish enthusiast, and as far as tea tree oil goes, it is commonly found in otc products for treating fish with open wounds or torn fins. Just go check out the fish aisle at your local pet store.