How to Treat Head Lice

As a foster parent of more than fifty children in my adult lifetime, we have had our share of needing lice treatments at our house. Lice are unpleasant to deal with, and have a stigma of shame attached to them. For a long time, I dealt with increasing fear and frustration when I knew my large family had been exposed.

Over the counter lice treatments have always been useless. I once resorted to the very expensive prescription lice shampoo, which wiped out the lice, but carried some pretty heavy risks, and I cringed using that on a little child's head.

When a case struck us yet again, I turned to home remedies, coating the heads of the children different times with olive oil, mayonnaise, Listerine, tea tree oil and all manner of things that were messy and took days to get out of the children's hair. They were effective in the long term, but not a quick fix.

One day as I was once again looking at lice treatments, it suddenly hit me - essential oils seemed to be a reoccurring theme in the home remedies. I began to think about this, and it seemed to me one of the most powerful essential oils was clove oil, and maybe peppermint. Those were things I already had in my medicine cabinet, so I went out and bought a cheap bottle of hair conditioner and added a large dose of these two oils to it, and stirred well. I washed the child's hair, then applied the conditioner and left it on five minutes or so, then combed out their hair with a metal lice comb while the conditioner was still in their hair, so that it wouldn't pull.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked wonders! There was not a single live louse. Since this was not poisonous, I simply used it every two days for a week, just to make sure, and never saw another live lice. An added benefit was that the children's hair smelt wonderful! I felt good that I had finally hit on something that I could safely use on my children's hair to get rid of lice.

Recently, we had some children spend the night, and as I combed one child's hair, I saw that she had a pretty hefty case of lice. For the first time, I didn't react with fear at all. I got out the bottles of clove and peppermint oils (something you can easily find in health food stores) and put a big dose in our bottle of conditioner and went ahead and added it to the shampoo bottle, too. I decided not to wait to see if we ended up with it or not, I just used the oils as a preventative. So far, so good!

So the next time you are exposed to lice, go to your local health food store and get a bottle of clove and a bottle of peppermint oil. Add a good teaspoon or more to your bottle of conditioner. You will be happy with the results, both that the lice will be killed, and your child will smell really nice!