Treat a Respiratory Infection (RI) from Home. DIY

[Skiploder]

we can both repeat what we said until we're blue in the face, but that leads to nothing. i wasn't trying to turn this into a debate. just trying to help other people out. i do not think vets should assume and treat any illness without running tests first, and many vets do this. while i do agree with some of your points, maybe you can help me understand your side better and help me fix my logic if it's incorrect. my logic does not come from reptile keeping or posts on forums. it comes from my lifelong experience having parents as veterinarians, a pediatrician grandfather, and working at a vet clinic for 8 years. i realize you're older and have more experience when it comes to keeping reptiles, although i believe i may have more experience being around veterinarians, so please correct me if i'm wrong.

antibiotics treat bacterial infections, correct?

antibiotics do not treat fungal, viral or parasitic infections.

antibiotics would not work if an animal was infected with parasites or a virus.

if illness is unknown, veterinarians (or doctors) treat an illness with the most common drug that clears these symptoms.

in a snake, if viral respiratory infections were more common than bacterial, antibiotics would not be the most common drug that cleared these symptoms.

in veterinarians' experience, antibiotics work more often than not.

-therefore, my logic is telling me bacterial respiratory infections are more common than viral or parasitic.


i'm in no way trying to offend you, belittle you, or start a heated debate, and i would appreciate the same respect in turn. just explaining where my logic comes from and putting it out there for criticism.

Simply put, there is no way of knowing if one is more prevalent than the other. Most vets assume everything is bacterial and treat it as such. Enlightened vets culture and treat accordingly. In may cases, the cultures show there is no proliferation of harmful bacteria.

All you have to do is talk to other keepers and find out (1) that many vets actually dissuade them from taking a culture and (2) many vets prescribe antibiotics without knowing if the cause if bacterial.

There are too many cases on this forum alone of unresolved RIs that miraculously survive round after round of antibiotics. When the boneheaded vet finally decides to take a culture, that culture is questionable because the animal has already been through two rounds of gram negative cephalosporins or other drugs.

Until culturing is the norm and until people spend money to necropsy animals that die after not responding to the blind dosing of baytril or other common antibiotics, no one has enough data to prove what the most common RI causes are.

Some RIs are secondary acute infections caused by the compromising of the immune system due to ............... wait for it ........viruses. Antibiotics may cause a temporary period of relief but do not address the underlying cause. The snake shows a lessening or cessation of symptoms, the round of meds finishes but since the CAUSE (the virus) is not identified and treated, the secondary respiratory distress eventually comes back.

Over the last 5 years alone I have got God knows how many PMs and emails from keepers whose snakes do not respond to antibiotics or whose cultures come back negative but the vet still puts them on a baytril treatment cycle. Again, until we weed out the hack exotic vets, until culturing becomes the norm, until deceased snakes are routinely necropsied, I would not hazard to say what the common cause of most RIs are.

I lost my hero worship of vets a long time ago. No disrespect to your parents, but I've seen too many hacks who I wouldn't hire pull a tick off of my butt. I've got three decades in this hobby dealing in snakes, importing snakes, breeding snakes and selling snakes. I've treated a lot of imports for a lot of diseases and I've helped customers deal with their own health issues. I've got a vet I've used for a long time who is a true exotics vet and who I trust implicitly. I can honestly tell you that in my time, in my experience, I would not be so vain that I would dare state that I know what the most common cause of RIs in snakes are.

Your post is informative and based on experiences from people I know and trust, the F10 nebulizing treatment shows a lot of promise. Let's leave it at that.