Garlic for fin rot?!?

[Felessan]

I heard that garlic boosts betta's imune system and gelps cure fin rot, is this true?

[Oldfishlady]

Garlic is a great natural product, however, it will not do anything directly for fin rot.
It can help boost immunity by stimulating the appetite to improve nutrition- by using a drop or two of fresh garlic juice on the food before feeding.
I treat fin rot with 100% daily water changes and aquarium salt 1tsp/gal for 10 days.

[Felessan]

I feed him pellets flakes and freeze dryed blood worms. I hear you can use kosher salt what is it and can you?

[Felessan]

What about sea salt?

[Jennyinurmouth]

Aquarium Salt works best for me.
Goku is healing with that :)

[Adastra]

You want to use only kosher or aquarium salt. Regular salt is iodized, it contains iodine that can be toxic to fish. Aquarium salt and kosher salt are free of iodine and potassium that also gets added in to salt sometimes.

I'm not totally sold on the garlic thing myself. It has a chemical in it that is mildly antiparasitic, but it is very weak. You would need to use something like 90x the amount of garlic as you would use malachite green for instance, if you were treating a parasite like ich. Simply because the garlic is "natural" doesn't mean that the antiparasitic doesn't have similar negative aspects to malachite green--it is just a much, much lower concentration. Bettas never really encounter either electrolytes or garlic naturally--so I would only use salt/garlic when there is a medical need. If you are interested in the positives/negatives of using salt and garlic, I suggest you research them.

[Lion Mom]

Canning salt is the same as Kosher salt. Don't know what your grocery store has it labeled as. :)

And it is WAY less expensive than aquarium salt!!!

[Felessan]

ok

[Rain Drop]

Originally Posted by 1fish2fish

Ok.. Here is the recipe for the homemade food. (Credit to Brenda on my other forum... Cross posted with permission.)

I use only human grade items and amounts vary depending on how much you want to make, I make large amount and freeze it.
1-2 Fresh raw or cooked shrimp
3-6 fresh spinach leaves...depends if you use baby spinach or frozen, either will work
2-4 fresh garlic cloves

I use a garlic press and crush the garlic and blanch the spinach so it is warm and wilted and use a fork of side or a knife to smash these two together and make a green garlic paste and I chop the shrimp and smash the green garlic paste all together so you have a "green garlic shrimp paste". I place this in a zip lock bag and smash flat and freeze to make it easier to break off what I need to feed.
You can vary 2 items to what you have, you can use peas instead of spinach and fish instead of shrimp, but use only fresh garlic.

She also said if you just want to mix it with your regular food its 2 parts garlic to 1 part food. Just crush it up and feed it to them. It will take about 6 weeks to see if its helping (natural always takes longer).. but on the plus side your fish will be really healthy. I fed this recipe to my guys after I got back from a 2 week vacation where they didn't get any food and after a week or two they were back to normal.

Like everything don't feed this solely.. make sure you have a mix of stuff you feed. You can freeze this food and feed a small bit at a time (thaw it out first).

^^was on another thread