See Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, a fascinating book about research into the cognitive capabilities of fish. In research on some species of fish that have social hierarchies, it was found that lacing the water with anti-anxiety drugs such as Prozac made the fish lower down on the social hierarchy behave more boldly. And pain relievers helped injured fish. A very good book for laypeople.
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As a home remedy it should help disinfect the wound if you’re without insurance.
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When we need a home remedy chicken soup does the trick. I imagine you have something similar in your country—some kind of boiled cabbage or liverwurst broth, perhaps.
Same here; I’ve gotten the “fish” Amoxicillin and used it for things that I am 99.9% would be treated with Amoxicillin. A lot of the time, if it’s in pill form, you can look it up and it’ll be from the same production line as the human stuff.
And sometimes, once you’ve gone to the doctor, sat around, finally gotten the prescription, paid your co-pay, gone to the pharmacy, and gone home, you could have just gotten the damn antibiotics yourself.
Not that I advocate it, of course. We need to make it easier for people to just go to the doctor and get the stuff. I’m dreading taking a routine trip to the doctor this week because I know I’ll lose half a damn day so that I can talk to a doctor for five minutes and get a script for drugs I will probably take the rest of my life.
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Jesus. A post about suffering and hardship and you came in here to gloat. That’s pretty awful.
In my experience people who take pleasure in the misfortunes of others are usually themselves pretty unhappy. Considering how often you do this sort of thing, Fabian, I feel compelled to ask: Are you OK? Is there some sort of problem in your life that you need help with? Are you lonely? Is somebody bullying you?
I hope I’m not being too forward but if there’s any way I can help or if you just need someone to talk to, please PM me.
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You can get antibiotics without a prescription as long as they are marketed for fish in the US? You can’t in Europe (at least not in the countries I checked).
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Fixed that for you 
And really, the fact that US healthcare can be very good for some people, makes it worse that many people don’t get access to it.
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Antibiotics are not something you “just take.” Worst off they’re not something you take for a “couple of days” and then when you feel better you stop. Actions like these produce multi-drug resistant bacteria and can make illnesses much, much worse.
I’m not sure exactly how legal the practice is; rather than just being heavily tolerated. It must have been more legal in the recent past, or the new “veterinary feed directives” https://ahdc.vet.cornell.edu/programs/NYSCHAP/nysvfrp/vfd.cfm#AffectedVFD would have been moot; but I’m honestly having a hard time finding a breakdown of exactly what is and isn’t legal for OTC sale where.
The rules tend to be clearer about ‘scheduled’ or not; and my attempts to search are being muddied by all the reports on veterinary antibiotic use; which mostly focus on “how much, where, and why”; rather than whether or not somebody could just order them, or needed a vet to slap a signature on a form somewhere (and, since most of the large scale animal husbandry operations can get a vet to sign something if need be, those studies tend to focus only on ‘legal for growth enhancement’ vs. ‘theraputic use only’ if they mention legalities at all.)
Fish might be a while(if only because current aquaculture and fisheries practices would compare unfavorably even to current meatpacking operations without the Kobain rule for piscid suffering); but dog psychiatry is already alive and well, so one could probably draw on that for anything unscheduled.
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Help me out here: Where in FFabian’s post was there any evidence of gloating (it looked more like sarcastic critique to me) and, even more so, where was there ANY implication of taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes? Where?
TBH your reply to FFabian came across as wholly and egregiously inappropriate. If you have genuine concerns about anyone’s mental/psychological health, based on their posting history, reach out out or take other action privately, not as a public response to one particular post. Or were you trying - and utterly failing, for this reader - to be merely snarky?
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Short version of the story (and super simplified, by which I by no means mean to insult, I’m just assuming that cat liver physiology is not your thing): There are basically two pathways by which these drugs can be processed in the liver to be converted into their bioactive forms. One path leads to the glorious valley of decreased inflammation and comfort, and the other pathway leads to hepatotoxicity. Humans shunt most of this class of drugs down the “good” path, dogs less so, let’s say 50/50, and cats shunt most of them down the “bad” path. So with cats you have to use NSAID drugs that are super pre-selective and even then, only for very limited amounts of time, or whatever your cat’s concern is r.e. pain isn’t going to be a problem as it would be dead from liver failure.
Here’s a more detailed, but still pretty accessible reference for those who may not be biochemists or pharmacologists:
part 1
part 2
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1013.7916&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The NSAID info is largely in part 2.
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Thanks for the information. That was all very interesting and explains why it’s such a difficult problem. After spending the past 8 weeks caring for a post-surgery cat it was all very timely, too.
My condolences. I love my cat, but man, if I had to give him meds for 8 weeks, I’d seriously think about going with transdermals or just saying “F-it! You’re getting injectables!”.
(that being said, if you’ve got a cat that loves to snack, you can get compounded chewables that come in a metric f-ton of seafood flavors). [my cat is not really “food motivated”]
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Regressing toward the mean in a world where everyone is equally fucked?
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