After extensive experience with ticks in central Arkansas, I must agree.
For those who have ticks embedded:
In what state did it occur?
Did a physician identify it as a tick, and if so, what species?
Are people confusing ticks and chiggers? Mites? Bot fly larvae?
Ticks do not burrow under the skin, they imbed their sucking mouthparts just under the skin, only.
Ticks range greatly in size partly dependent on species and partly on larval stage. They can be smaller than a mustard seed. I pull ticks off myself and my family and my dogs, seasonally (here, it is winter/spring), and have for thirty years. I know from ticks.
Removing ticks is all about not pulling their bodies off while leaving their mouthparts under your skin. That makes an unpleasant scab, after digging into yourself with sharp instruments trying to remove them. I just use my fingers, nothing else. No twisting, no applications of heat or chemicals – those are bunk. Don’t try to poison or suffocate your tick. They ideally should come out alive, because you want them to release their hold on you, and they lack that kind of decision-making power after they’re dead. You want to grab firmly as close to the skin as ever you can get (get the skin as taut as possible to facilitate the requisite closeness), and pull slowly until you hear that faint ‘click’ that means they’ve let go.
After that, opinons differ. I like to toss them on a hot woodstove and watch them pop. My daughter favors pulling them into two pieces and my husband shudders and flushes them down the sink.
Have you gotten tested for Lyme Disease?
Your symptoms are not tick bite symptoms, which are localized.
Chiggers are just barely visible to the naked eye. You couldn’t distinguish legs if it were embedded. In any case they don’t actually burrow into the skin, but make a hole called a stylostome that they feed from.
Jiggers, or Chigoe fleas, burrow into the skin but are only found in tropical areas.
Tick bite symptomscan be exactly as **arpmail2012 **describes: headache, muscular stiffness, loss of control of the legs, the whole bit. The worst symptoms are usually displayed when the animal attaches to the neck, just as described.
There’s a species of tick in Australia that produces such severe symptoms that it killed hundreds of dogs a years before antivenom was invented. It still leads to a couple of dozen humans hospitalisations each year and and can easily kill children if left untreated. Basically, the paralysis starts at the legs and works its way northwards. You lose control of the knees, then the hips, then the elbows, then the shoulders, then you lose the ability to breathe.
Good night.
oh, thanks for sharing that.
I had one ‘burrow’ in so only the very end of it’s tick butt and it’s legs were hanging out. Dr ID’ed the tick as a dog tick. It basically made itself a little pocket in my leg.
I was bitten once and the head had to be dug out of my skin.
I’ve pulled out many a tick in my time and always just grabbed it and pulled it off, then crushed it between my fingernails, and off to the trash. Some get that big bulbous light brown swelling, others are just small and dark brown. I think it’s s separate species but it could be that I just caught them before they got to feed too much.
The way to get a chigger out (and dead) is to cover the burrow (the red mosquito-like bump) with clear fingernail polish. I’m told it suffocates them and they just die and the problem solves itself.
Wrong - wrong - wrong - wrong. You do not want the tick to let go voluntarily. If it does, it may vomit into the wound. That’s how you get Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. To remove a tick safely:
You use a tweezer, and grip it as close to the head as possible. Pulling gently, you twist it clockwise until it comes out.
It will hurt.
Me or the tick?
Yes.
To be safe, you could always just excise everything around the tick’s infiltration point. Might hurt a a bit - I suggest using alcohol topically, then orally, then topically again.
While this may be intended as a joke, I’d say you would be more likely to incur an infected wound by making it larger than necessary while not cutting down the chance of getting a tick-borne disease.
Does anyone have the statistics? I’ve always just yanked them off and crushed them or fed them to carnivorous plants. Perhaps we have wuss ticks in Arkansas.
My cat had never had a tick until last year. He now has had 4. I work as a firefighter and heard the guys talking about removing ticks and how hard it was to make sure you got it all out. I wanted to find an easier way and found this video. All 4 ticks that have been removed and have all just fallen out completely intact and then I just put a little rubbing alcohol on the bite area and flush the tick down the toilet
Sometimes the tick falls out after only 10 secs and others have taken up to 30 secs
Hope this helps
while twirling the tick may cause it to come out that is not necessarily a good method.
with a deer tick you would like to get it out within 24 hours of its attaching. you don’t want to give it time or opportunity to have the bacteria to get into you or your animal. doing anything but pulling it out correctly (grab front of the head, straight back) gives it a chance to puke the bacteria out.
be more concerned with the bacteria than getting it out whole. a mouth part in you may not cause infection, your body gets small pokes by foreign objects all the time. if you might get infected from a left-in mouth part (i, spouse or animals have not with over a decade of correctly pulling them out) it is a more easily controlled infection compared to Lyme disease.
Wait - is there a big difference between dog ticks and deer ticks? I have always just called them “ticks,” and the term “dog tick” was something that people used to refer to a tick after it became engorged and disgusting. If a person gets a tick, he usually will remove it when it’s still small, but dogs (especially out in the country where I grew up) have their ticks attached for a long time, so the ones you see on dogs are the same ticks, but in the engorged state.
I had never heard the term “deer tick” until Lyme disease became a hot topic in what, the 1970s? And the deer tick seems to be one specific species.
Anyway, that’s my experience with the colloquial terms. This page shows a few species of ticks found in the area where I grew up - there is the deer tick specific species, plus a couple that are called dog ticks, plus another with a different name. But the point is that they all look pretty similar, and I think they all would blow up to the size of maybe not a small grape, but a pea or bean.
the dog tick is bigger both before and after feeding than the deer tick.
dog ticks don’t get huge on people because you usually find them before they have fed very long.
deer ticks being smaller can get engorged ( long enough to spread disease) on people before being discovered.