Holding the snake upside down will do nothing.

For someone with only 3 days of experience with a ball python, I really wouldn't reccomend the "turn up the heat and hope it goes away" method of treating a URI.

Like hhw said, turn up the heat! ... If she has a URI, husbandry is the first thing to fix. Second, please take her to a vet with at least basic reptile experience. A proper diagnosis and anti-biotics are the safest, fastest, and only sure way of clearing up a URI.

Over the years I've seen plenty of "home-style" URI remedies end up allowing the infection to turn systemic and killing ball pythons from something that could have been fixed with a car ride and a couple of injections.

Quote Originally Posted by hhw
Do not use frozen/thawed unless you are prepared to inject the prey item with vitamin C, as the freezing/thawing process destroys some of the vitamin C in rodents
hhw, do you have any papers or references that back this up? I've heard this statement made for years now and have never seen any studies done that shows it to be true? There was a rumor about a paper being written years ago but I've never been able to get my hands on it. Any help you might be able to provide would be greatly appreciated!

Hope this helps

-adam