A 6 week old chick, with an upside-down head?!?

[HamsHen50]

So I have this little Aruacana chick, I think is a rooster (let me know if I’m wrong) and he has his head slowly going upside down. The only times his neck and head are straight and normal is when he is drinking water. Besides that it’s sideways. I’m quite sure that it will go completely upside-down at some point, this is because, about a year ago we had another blue based, orange aruacana, just like him have the exact same problem, but he was only about 4 weeks at the time. And within about a week his head went from normal too completely upside-down. Weird. Right?
We had to put down the chick from about a year ago, because anything we tried, failed. We tried keeping him in his own pen (still able to socialise with his sibling, just with mesh in between) and gave him a special chick starter-virgin olive oil mix (it’s apparently meant to help??) But nothing worked, so we put him out of his misery.

How can I help this new chick? What’s wrong with him? Niacin deficiency? What? Any help is welcome.

He can still eat and drink. He just struggles too.

 

[sean_wonder]

This looks like a case of wry neck to me, which is usually a Vitamin E deficiency though sometimes can be from selenium if I'm remembering correctly. I'm a bit of an insomniac, so sorry for the late tag @Eggcessive but you're better with Vitamin stuff/recommending supplements from what I've seen...

 

[HamsHen50]

Haha all good. I’m in Australia so it’s there is still very bright here lol. What supplements could I use? I thought they would get selenium and vitamin E from there chick starter and grass. Thanks for the reply

 

[Eggcessive]

He has wry neck, also called torticolis or crook neck, which is a neurological condition. Chickens can have it from vitamin E or B1 thiamine deficiency, heredity, head or neck injury, and later in certain diseases that affect the brain. Yes, he gets those things from his feed, but may need more temporarily. Most of the time we usually go ahead and recommend giving both vitamin E 400 IU daily, as well as thiamine or human super B complex 1/4 tablet daily, along with some scrambled egg for selenium. You don’t want to give too much selenium since too much is not good. Give the supplements for a couple of weeks. Help him to get enough to eat. Make sure chicken feed is fresh since vitamin E can leech out if feed is old. Separate him if others pick on him. Let us know how he gets along.

 

[HamsHen50]

Today he’s been much worse. I’ve been giving them a chick starter / duck egg mixture and nothing helps. His head is now completely upside down and he has these “episodes” where he falls over backwards and can’t seem to figure out how to move around and stand back up. We might have to put him down if nothing works over then next few days.