Host No More for tapeworm?

[melissa]

So it’s Saturday evening on a holiday weekend ( Canadian Thanksgiving weekend) and we just noticed a tapeworm segment on my 5 month old cats bum. I wiped it off to make sure it was what I thought and it definitely was. So we live in a very small town- our regular vet is almost 2 hours away. Every vet in that proximity is closed until Tuesday. So my husband went to our local pet store and came home with “Host No More”, homeopathic drops that are given 3 times a day for 2 weeks to make the cats body inhospitable to hookworms, roundworms and tapeworms. It states it does not kill the worms but allows the cat to pass them naturally. So with really no other choice I gave my two cats the first dose. Does anyone here have experience with this? What can I expect- the passing of live worms? Should I get traditional worm pills from my vet as soon as I’m able? The cat was dewormed as a small kitten but not specifically for tapeworms by the SPCA we adopted him from. This is definitely something I dropped the ball on. He had a lot of problems with URIs so I didn’t get around to treating him proactively for tapeworm

 

[silent meowlook]

I have no idea about the homeopathic drops. I would imagine they don’t work.
Tapeworms won’t kill your cat or cause any major problem. Just call your vet when they open. Remember tapeworms come from fleas.

 

[Caspers Human]

If your cat JUST has worms and no other health problems the problem will keep until you are able to take him to the vet.

Worms aren't a good thing but, unless it is a bad infestation or unless there are other health problems that complicate things, they aren't life threatening in the short term. (By "short term" I mean a few days or even a week.)

Your proper course of action would be to have a vet diagnose the problem and prescribe the correct medication. Given the right medication, your cat's tapeworm infestation will be usually gone after one or two doses. The usual treatment works in just days.

According to the package directions, the remedy you suggest takes fourteen days. Given that information, right there, treatment by the vet wins, hands down. If you wait three days then call the vet, your cat's worms should be gone by the end of the week. Following the instructions on your remedy, the problem MIGHT be resolved in two weeks.

If it was my druthers, I'd bet on the sure thing versus a "maybe" any day.

About homeopathic remedies:

The way homeopathic remedies are made is by diluting some substance that somebody believes might have an effect on the problem, many, many times. If you look at the ingredients statement on a package of homeopathic remedy, you'll see, somewhere, the notation "X" or "C." If it says "X" it means your remedy is diluted by a factor of ten. "C" means a factor of one hundred.

When you read the label and it says "10x" that means that the indicated substance was mixed with something else (usually sugar or alcohol) ten times at a 1-to-10 ratio.

For instance, if the ingredients statement says, "Extract of Bolonium - 10x," that means that they took some Bolonium and mixed it with ten parts sugar then mixed it up, really well. Then they repeated the process ten more times. The result is a dilution of 10 to the tenth power. (10^-10). That's a 1 with ten decimal places in front of it. (0.0000000001)

Ask yourself how could Extract of Bolonium have any effect on the body at such a dilution rate.

If you bought at 15 ml. bottle of Extract of Bolonium Homeopathic Preparation, you would actually be getting just 0.0000000015 ml. (1.5 picoliter) of actual product. That would be an amount too small to see with the naked eye. It would take expensive scientific equipment to measure such a small amount.

Some homeopathic remedies are sold at dilutions of "100c" or even more. That means that our Extract of Bolonium would be diluted at a ratio of 1 part in 100 and that process would be repeated one hundred times. That would be the equivalent of dumping a bottle of aspirin into Lake Superior then drinking a glass of that water and expecting it to cure your headache. Does that even make sense?

Bottom line: Better to get your vet's advice than to trust some snake oil product that doesn't even have anything in it.

 

[IndyJones]

Worms can also be transmited to people, especialy children who touch and stick everything including their hands in their mouths. Not something you want to mess around with.

I would just get a dewormer from the vet and be done with it.

 

[melissa]

Oh I want to get a dewormer pill from the vet, and will. I just can’t until Tuesday. This was my only choice until then and it seemed better than doing nothing at all

 

[Caspers Human]

The problem will keep until Tuesday.