Hacker News Reader

IIRC the recommended approach now is to freeze them off with those wart removers you can find at drug stores. Even the special tweezers were hard enough to use properly that it's no longer the recommended approach.

View on HN

'How to handle those bloody potentially life-ruining ticks properly' is something that seems to change rather frequently. Quite annoying, despite the fact that improvements in that area are welcome.

Any definite source? Pulling them out is usually easy.. but not always, if freezing them off is feasible and better would like to try, but this thread now has already the bad alcohol recommendation :/ so would like to make sure not just hearsay?

Good question. I've read a lot of local news here in New England in the last year that recommends freezing, but looking up formal sources... it isn't so simple. Seems like freezing means you still end up using tweezers for the removal, but the risk of pushing toxins back into your bloodstream is lessened because the toxins themselves are frozen inside the tick.

So I guess the recommendation remains: remove with tweezers carefully, targeting the head so as to avoid sqeezing the body and flushing toxins back into your body. Which is easier than heading to a drugstore for freezing wart removers anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com