Do Natural Chicken Remedies Really Work?

[Folly's place]

Also, 'natural' is not so well defined. There's nothing 'natural' about colloidal silver, and DE is strip mined (look it up, with pictures) so not so very nice either.
I'm not raising jungle fowl in Thailand, so there's not a lot that's 'natural' about my chickens, or their environment, here in Michigan. We do the best we can with who we have, and where we are.
And I'll take modern medicine every time!
Mary

 

[Solanacae]

I take an integrated approach to herbal and modern remedies. I use herbal remedies (mostly teas, a daily cider vinegar tonic, and elderberry syrup) and a first line of defense to help prevent illness along with probiotics and minimally processed foods. A healthy diet and lifestyle goes a long ways in preventing disease and injury.

I use pain killers, cough syrup, and just today I took my little to the doctor to test for strep. If it had been positive, I would’ve treated with antibiotics. I’ve had surgery to take out wisdom teeth and to fix a messed up ankle, and injections for trigger finger.

But along with the cough syrup, I’ll drink teas with honey to ease the sore throat and clear the runny nose, and it keeps my kids better hydrated. They might refuse water with a sore throat, but warm tea feels good.

As for chickens, I take a similar approach. They eat a balanced feed that is mostly whole grains/seeds/legumes, get a large section of my yard to roam around and forage in, and apple cider vinegar in their water for probiotics. Cayenne in the feed helps deter rodents and boosts laying. But if I have tapeworms (and I do, just treated yesterday morning) I go for something with praziquantel in it because that’s going to get rid of them more effectively than anything else. Will I try other things that could possibly help prevent or slow down the recurrence of tapes? Definitely. But if I see little segments in their poop again, I’ll know it’s time for a more aggressive intervention.

As for your neighbor, who seems to be careless with the treatments she uses but still has healthy chickens, that may be luck, or it may be serendipitous genetics, or it may be that her other management practices are balancing out the effects, or it may be that there is damage happening but it’s it noticeable because chickens are very good at hiding things until it’s too late. It’s really hard to say. I know of one person who was given too much colloidal silver as a kid and now has a permanent grey tinge to her skin. She is otherwise fine and healthy, but her skin color is a long term effect of how her parents chose to raise her. How humans process things they ingest is different from how chickens do, we have different physiologies.

You just have to read a lot, try some things out, and see how you feel about it after you’ve had a chance to see how your birds fare. Eventually, you’ll settle on some general principles that work for you and your style of chicken husbandry.