Originally Posted by cwgibson
ok so we want to be specific. fine brackish,next time a monsoon comes through my tank ill check the salinity, but from what i keep hearing this low salinity kills inverts and live rock and corals.so we take the fish and put him/her in "brackish" conditions for several weeks in a qt tank.in my case i would have to take my 6 in blue hippo and put her in my 20g qt,sounds nice.why dont we all live in a closet for that amount of time,it could be fun. i dont know what to say people want studies and proof about something but when someone mentions a new product they bash it, so i dont know how you expect to get positive results. i mean what kind of proof would you like? what do you think studies are,they are the same as testimonials,but they come from scientist
You've got to understand the position of some of us. We've spent years hearing about how this new product and that new product works, but inevitably, what we find out in the end is that it doesn't.
While I'm sure nobody on here would disagree that putting a large hippo like this into a 20 gallon tank is stressfull, you seem to be disregarding the possibility of any stress that simply dumping chemicals into your reef would cause your livestock, or the stress of potentially subjecting the fish to an extended infection until we eventually discover that the infection remains and hte medication in fact doesn't work.
At the end of the day, the reason these alleged reef safe medications (at least the ones I've seen so far) get good press is due to a general lack of understanding of the parasite and it's life cycle. People dump a chemcial into the tank and voila! The ich is gone! Therefore, it's a 100% effective, 100% reef safe cure! I'm sure nobody would disagree that this is flawed reasoning.
The only way to really know with any certainty that a medication is effective is though a solid, time tested reputation by large numbers of people, to reduce the margin of error introduced by inexperienced or naive aquarists (not saying that's what we have here). Until then, this is just like anything else that has a mythical quality to it. For example, there are tons of products on the Internet that claim that they can dramatically increase your gas mileage. For the most (or all) part, they have been debunked as scams. So if someone were to come along and claim that a particular gadget really works, you'd expect him to be met with a certain amount of skepticism, most likely regarding how he tested, how long he tested, and overall what makes him so sure it really works.
The people on this board who are asking questions here are people who have seen mega-dollar reef systems destroyed by someone who was suckered by one of these "miracle cures." All they are looking out for is the people on here who might believe such a claim as this thread's title without an understanding of the risks and without realizing that inadequate testing may have been performed.
By your logic and very admission, we should just dump some new product with boistrous claims into our reef systems and see for ourselves before we bash it... I can't speak for anyone else on there but I can say straight out that I'm going to wait for studies and real testing in controlled conditions by people who aren't in the pockets of the companies making the products before I do that. A few people that claim it works when the ich could very well have just fallen off on it's own is not enough proof for me.