Options for Treating Head Lice
When it comes to treating head lice, there have traditionally been three options: medications sold at drugstores; natural or home remedies recommended by other parents; and plain old combing and nitpicking.
There are challenges with all three. First, most drugstore lice products use a class of pesticides called pyrethroids to kill live lice. Most head lice in the United States and some other countries, have developed resistance to pyrethroids. Also, do you really want to be washing your child’s hair with a pesticide?
Home remedies are completely unproven. The most common recommendations are smothering a child’s head with mayonnaise or petroleum jelly overnight. Mayonnaise? Petroleum jelly? Really? These approaches are meant to suffocate live lice. “Natural” treatments recommended like tea tree oil can actually prove toxic if over-applied.
None of these methods, even if they were to be effective, kill eggs. Eggs are the trickiest part of lice treatment. They are extremely hard to see and remove, and if you miss one, the egg will hatch and you’ll have a fresh case of head lice on your hands.
This brings us to combing and nitpicking. This is a long and tedious process. As Health.com points out, “It’s best to approach lice as a war on many fronts: You need to use a variety of techniques to kill not only adult lice, but also their tiny eggs (called nits), which are glued to the hair shaft. The nits can survive treatments that kill the adults and vice versa (These bugs have evolved over a millennium to live in hair, so they’re tricky).”
What’s a parent to do? “It’s best to steel yourself for weeks or months of vigilance since lice can reappear due to repeated exposure or a missed nit.”
Fortunately, science has come to the rescue with a revolutionary medical device that kills live lice and eggs in a single treatment. Researchers at the University of Utah developed a device that kills lice by applying carefully controlled warm air to the hair and scalp, dehydrating live lice and eggs in a matter of minutes.
AirAllé Lice Treatment
The device, called AirAllé, has been through the lengthy FDA-clearance process where in clinical trials it was found to kill live lice and 99.2 percent of eggs. The AirAllé has now been commercialized by Larada Sciences of Salt Lake City and made available through a fast-growing network of Lice Clinics of America urgent care centers around the world.
Lice Clinics of America centers featured certified AirAllé technicians that deliver treatments that last about 90 minutes in most cases, and results are guaranteed.
Because the AirAllé device only uses heated air to kill lice and eggs, there are no harmful chemicals involved and no lengthy nitpicking process is required.
This sounds a lot more pleasant than pesticides or sleeping with a head full of mayonnaise.
Let’s leave pesticides in farms (maybe not) but keep them out of our hair. Let’s leave mayonnaise on sandwiches, which can be quite delicious. Let’s use science and medicine to treat head lice.
Parents, educators, and healthcare providers have embraced Lice Clinics of America as a fast, safe, effective lice treatment. They no longer have to steel themselves for weeks or months of battle using substances that have no business on a child’s scalp.
