Got Lice? Here’s how to treat it!

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Head lice can be an intimidating thing to deal with. We offer two treatment methods that will ensure that your family is lice free! Our first treatment is a saline comb out performed by our trained clinicians in our clinic. We use a saline solution to comb through every strand of hair in order to remove as many nits as possible. We finish with our dimethicone “goop” that kills any crawling bug on the head within 10 minutes. In 7 to 10 days, we do another saline comb out in order to ensure you are completely lice free. Lice can lay eggs so close to the scalp that even our combs cannot get them. This is why we require a second treatment within 7 to 10 days following the first treatment. This allows the hair to grow enough for our combs to get the rest of the nits left behind. 

Our second method of treatment is a lower cost option: our at-home treatment. With this treatment, the dimethicone goop is used on days 0, 10, and 20. In between these days, you must comb out the hair each day in order to remove the nits. By using the goop every 10 days and removing the nits, there eventually will not be any louse left to lay new eggs. A louse takes approximately 30 days to develop from an egg to an adult louse. However, a female louse that is over 10 days old is able to lay eggs. This is why it is important to comb the hair every day in between the goop treatments. The less eggs there are left to hatch, the less bugs there will be to lay more eggs. 

 

School kids in masks

Head Lice During Quarantine

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While a lot of people are social distancing lately, having social groups, jobs, and schools closed does not inhibit head lice from spreading! Head lice is being shared between family members and quarantine groups. Now as things open up and families start having vacations, meeting extended family members again, or beginning their sports clubs, head lice will begin to spread again.

Here are a few things to remember about head lice during social distancing!

 

Head lice are mostly spread through head to head contact, so make sure when you hang out with people again, stay apart! Six feet apart helps you stay safe from head lice, too. For your children’s sport groups, the best way is to prevent head lice during quarantine is to keep your hair tied up and don’t borrow other people’s helmets.

The best hairstyles for head lice prevention is to keep your hair back as close to your head as possible. Because head lice move from loose hair to loose hair, keeping your hair in tight braids or buns is the best way to keep yourself lice free. Ponytails don’t work if you have long hair, because a lot of it will still swing loose and attract head lice.

Another good tip is scents from the mint family! Anything from the mint family will help you keep head lice off your head, but peppermint and spearmint are the best. Check out our preventive line in the store! We do curbside or we can ship with USPS right to your door.

Head lice during quarantine is a very real problem. Because everyone is spending extra time with family, when one family member has head lice, its more likely that everyone has head lice. Our head checks are done by combing our your head until we either identify lice, or until we have combed your entire head and can tell you that you are clear. They are only $25 per person (or included with in-clinic services), or you can order enough Treatment Goop to proactively treat the whole family.

 

Whichever way you choose to get rid of head lice during quarantine, we have got your back!

What’s Effective, Visual Head Lice Checks or Combing?

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Recently, we’ve had customers ask why we don’t do visual head lice checks in addition to our comb-out checking. The reason? Visual checks can miss a lot of things. The nits and lice are the same color if your hair is dyed and  It can be hard to spot the few eggs/nits that are laid so close to the scalp.  This is especially true if you have a light infestation.

In fact, a 2001 study showed that, “The average time until detection of the first louse was 57.0 seconds with the comb as compared to 116.4 seconds by direct visual examination. Diagnosis of louse infestation using a louse comb is four times more efficient than direct visual examination and twice as fast.”

While visual head lice checks are still better than no check at all, a lice infestation would have to be fairly advanced in order for it to be easily seen with the naked eye. Many summer camps, school programs, or day cares will use pencils or chopsticks to  inspect the scalp. This is still good! Any check is better than no check at all.

However, we go right to combing to see what the comb finds. This is a better use of both our time and your time. It helps us find lice and nits twice as fast! Then we can get you lice free and back to your day.

We sell our Terminator brand professional combs, so you can use what we use on your children at home! We have a tutorial video on how to do thorough comb outs, and we have an instruction sheet posted as well. For more information or to schedule an appointment, call (865) 245-5353!

Back to School!

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It’s that time of year again! Lice are prevalent in schools across America, and it seems like Tennessee has been hit pretty hard lately. We have a few quick ways to prevent lice from spreading within your classrooms and schools.

  1. Keep long hair up. Lice don’t jump or fly, they travel from loose hair to loose hair. Buns and braids are the best way to keep lice from making the switch to your head. Keeping all the flyaways down is very important!
  2. No head to head contact. Even a bun won’t save you if you put your head on someone else’s head.
  3. Peppermint spray. Tea tree oil does not prevent head lice. A good preventive spray uses essential oil from the mint family, of which peppermint is the best.
  4. Vacuum or lint roll yourself and your furniture. Both vacuuming and lint rolling will get lice off of soft surfaces. For plastic or vinyl, use a Clorox wipe.
  5. Hugs, unfortunately, are a good way to spread head lice. Side hugs, high fives, and fist bumps are good alternatives! Selfies are also responsible for the rise of head lice in middle, high school, and college students. Be sure to warn your students about the dangers or touching heads.
  6. Sharing is not all that caring. Even sharing things like jackets can spread head lice, because many people have hair long enough to touch the fabric. Hoodies that get pulled on over the head will also spread lice.

When in doubt, contact your lice clinic for a head check. At only $25, we can give you peace of mind within 30 minutes.

If you have any questions, call or email us today!

Lice Treatment After Care Instructions

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Thank you for choosing Knoxville Lice Clinic!  Here are your lice treatment after care instructions.

For All Treatment Services

  • A head check with Treatment Goop application is not a lice treatment, it only tells if you have lice. If you have lice but did not get a Saline Comb-Out or Headwinds treatment, you have not been treated for lice. 
  • Treatment Goop must be washed out with our Clarifying Shampoo or dish detergent. It will often take more than one wash. If you miss any, that’s ok! It will not harm your hair or skin. 
  • If Treatment Goop gets on fabric, it might stain. Pretreat it with dish soap before washing.  If it still shows a spot after the dryer, wash it again.
  • If someone finds live bugs less than 3 weeks after a Headwinds treatment or Saline Follow-up, it is a re-infestation. If someone who did not get checked or treated finds live bugs, they had lice before the rest of the family was treated. 

Who Needs to Know

  • Everybody! Some specific people to inform are the schools, your friends, your child’s friends, after school programs, day cares, sports teams, clubs, and child care. 
  • If you saw family or went on a vacation with anybody, let them know. 
  • If you had your hair done recently, let the hairdresser know. 
  • We can call businesses, sports teams, schools, and day cares. Give us the information and we will make sure they are informed, with your identity left out. 
  • Do not let your children play with or sleep over at any friend or family member’s house until they have confirmed they are lice free. You will get lice again. 

For Short Form Headwinds Treatments

  • You will itch! When we dehydrate the nits, we dehydrate your scalp. Our Nutrient Conditioner will help. In addition, washing out the Treatment Goop can cause dryness and itching. 
  • We do not do any sort of comb out. This is your responsibility.
  • Nits do not ever fall off hair. They will remain on your head until you comb them out at home. 
  • The nits are dead, and you are lice free. 
  • There is no discounted recheck offered, but an appointment can be made for a comb-out at $50 per half-hour.
  • We do not offer a guarantee on our Short Form treatment. 

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Holiday Head Lice Checklist

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No one wants to deal with head lice, especially after a hectic and stressful holiday period!  Parents have enough on their plates with the travel, entertaining, shopping, and cleaning everything up after the New Year.  We put together this head lice checklist for preventing lice infestations after the holidays.

Unfortunately, the holidays can be a peak time for head lice, so it is important to be vigilant.  This is especially true if you traveled to spend time with other families or hosted other families in your home. Lice primarily spread through head-to-head contact, and children get lice more often than adults do because kids spend more time in close contact.

Whether you were the visitor or the visited, there are some steps you can take to ensure that you don’t send your child back to school with head lice.

  1. Get a professional lice screening. If there is a chance you or your children were exposed to head lice over the holidays, the best thing you can do for yourself and your peace of mind is get a professional head lice screening. We offer them for just $25, and if you do have head lice and choose to be treated at our clinic, that fee is waived. Head lice can be very difficult to diagnose, and false positives are very common. You do not want to get treated for head lice if you don’t have the bugs!
  1. Use preventative products. People tend to deal with head lice reactively—meaning we freak out when we find head lice in our children and try to get rid of the problem as fast as we can. That’s perfectly normal, but we now have products that can help to prevent head lice in the first place. Peppermint Spritz, Spearmint Conditioner (my personal favorite!), Peace Love Mint Preventive Headbands, Treatment Goop and Terminator Combs are available at our clinic or on our online store. Unlike most over-the-counter lice products, all Knoxville Lice Clinic products are safe and pesticide-free.

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Who to Tell About Head Lice

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We have a lot of families in here who find out they have head lice and freeze. Who do they tell? How far back to do they need to go? What if it’s embarrassing?

The hard truth is that you need to share the information. Most people have head lice from 6-8 weeks before the population builds up enough to become noticeable, so you need to look at least two months back to see who to inform. This isn’t just for their benefit; if you don’t tell anybody, they can’t get checked, and there is a risk that they can give it back to you and you’ll have to do this whole thing over again.

Here is a general list of who you need to contact about having lice:

  • Family. If you saw your sister, or just babysat your nephews, or the kids spent the weekend at their grandparents, all those people have been exposed to lice.
  • Friends. Many of our clients are in school, and their friends’ parents need to know that their children have been exposed to lice. This is even more critical if they have sleepovers, or if they hug or share jackets or hats.
  • Significant others. If you have lice, odds are the person you hang out with a lot has lice, as well. Hugs, cuddles, and bed sharing are great ways to spread lice. For middle or high school students, borrowing a hoodie or jacket from someone you have a crush on is a great way to catch it, even with minimal personal contact.
  • Roommates, dorm mates, sorority sisters, or fraternity brothers. If you share a living space, there’s a great chance you accidentally shared lice.
  • Sports teams. Sometimes Little League teams share helmets. Most girls’ teams require ponytails, which can flip lice through the air from girl to girl during a game or cheerleading or dance routine. In addition, these teams foster tight friendships, so you can often inform their friend circle and their team with a few calls.
  • Child care. Day cares have lice the same way schools do, and so do after school programs. If you have a regular babysitter, nanny, or just a good friend or family member who watches your child, let them know as well.
  • Salons. Sometimes your hairdresser will miss seeing lice in your hair. Because they work so closely with hair, they have special regulations associated with head lice. It is a good policy to let them know if there’s a chance you had lice during your last visit.

The good news is, we can help. If you give us names and numbers, we will call schools, dance groups, coaches, after school programs, day cares, and hair dressers. We do it anonymously, saying only that we had a client come in (in Mrs. Smith’s class, in 9th grade, in the 7pm dance class on Wednesdays) who had lice. They are now lice free, but the client requested we inform the business that head lice were in their location.

The only way to keep our community lice free is if the entire community works together. Some schools cannot inform parents that head lice were found, so your best bet is to tell your friends. Moms have an amazing informal information network. Your school’s PTA can help make sure that people are doing monthly head checks and keeping their children clear, which will reduce the likelihood of your own children catching it again.

House Cleaning for Head Lice

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Cleaning your house is vital to getting head lice out of your life. With so much misinformation on the internet, I wanted to give you a list of what to clean and how to do it, so you can move right on with your lice-free life.

  • Wash all bedding, towels, and clothing used by infested family members in the past 48 hours. Use hot water or high heat settings.
  • Things that can’t be washed can still be put in the dryer for 45 minutes on high.
  • If it can’t go in the dryer, bag it up for 48 hours. Lice need to feed every 3 hours, and will starve to death in 48 hours.
  • Hair things like brushes, combs, hair ties, hair bows, hats, or helmets, can go in the freezer for 8 hours.
  • Vacuum or use a lint roller on everything fabric. Vacuum the floors, lint roll or vacuum the couches/recliners.
  • Remember to vacuum or lint roll your car!
  • Smooth surface things can be wiped down with Clorox wipes.

Lice don’t burrow, so you only need to clean the surface of things. You don’t have to throw anything out.

Don’t use bug sprays or bug bombs. Lice are immune to the pesticides, so it needlessly covers your house in poison without actually killing the lice.

Having lice is stressful. Getting rid of it doesn’t have to be. With these easy tips, you can get your house clean in a few hours, and have your life back faster.

It’s Sports Season!

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It’s football season! Which means it’s also cheerleading and marching band season. I know teenagers in football, marching band, color guard, lacrosse, drumline, and cross country. Sports are great! Anything with a team gives children (and adults!) a sense of family, that tight friend group that welcomes you in and makes you belong.

Unfortunately, having people that close often leads to lice. Shared baseball helmets in Little League, volleyball team sleepovers, the swim team that lends brushes between girls. These are all great ways to share head lice. Even team pictures can have people close enough to share head lice. Once it finds its way onto a team, the only way to be really clear of it is to have everybody be lice free at the same time.

That’s where we come in. We can eradicate lice from your entire team in one weekend, often one day. Between head checks, our in-clinic treatments, and our DIY options, we can get the whole team, including coaches, back into practice and winning games without the distraction of an itchy head. Our Peppermint Spritz and Spearmint Conditioner helps keep you lice free, and buns and braids instead of pony tails will keep loose hair from a louse’s tiny claws. Overall, our head lice treatment will get you lice free and out the door in time for your next practice, and you won’t miss a single beat.

Why You Should Bring Your Whole Family to the Lice Clinic

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We know that family bonding day at the head lice clinic isn’t high on anyone’s list of family adventures to go on. It can be complicated to get both parents off work, or all the kids at home at the same time on a weekend. Packing up the baby’s stuff, bringing snacks for toddlers, wondering how long until your third grader goes from “irritating but handling it” to “full on melt down,” it’s all hard. So why do those crazy lice people keep insisting the entire family make the trek to the clinic?

 

Believe it or not, we’re trying to help. Lice get transferred very easily, and odds are more people than you think have head lice. In fact, in our informal everyday work, we figured that about 80% of moms, 20% of dads, and 50% of siblings have the dreaded little bugs. The risk is higher for whoever has been combing out the kids, the primary caregiver, or if mom or dad like to bed share or snuggle up and read books or have movie nights with the kids. Because less than half of people with lice will itch, you can completely overlook someone with lice and catch it back from someone living in your own house. We are so serious about getting your whole family lice free, if you bring everyone in, we’ll guarantee the service.

 

Family is important. You want to hug your kids, we want to keep you lice free while you do it.