Second round of General Cure???

bonniej · Jun 4, 2025

I am trying to save our Royal Gramma. He started to flash (rub his face on the rocks and sand) last Thursday. After researching, we did a fresh water dip on Friday and thought we saw some dead flukes come off him, but we are new to the hobby and not sure. He was still eating as if Saturday. We went to the LFS on Saturday and got API General Cure, which we put in Saturday evening, and again 48 hours later as instructed. He is still alive, breathing and occasionally moving from one hiding place to another, but he hasn’t been observed eating in a couple of days. He occasionally comes out and flashes once or twice but not as frantically as he did before the General Cure.

The tank has a watchman goby who flashed twice on Saturday and has been hiding a lot since the medication started, but seems totally normal today. Swimming and eating, no flashing. (The KFS said we could put the medication in with our main tank since the goby also flashed.)

We also have 2 clowns in the tank who seem unaffected by either flukes or the medication.

The questions are:
Should I do another treatment of General Cure?
If so, should I do a 25% water change before doing that, because that’s the last step of the instructions on the General Cure box.

21 gallon tank
Ammonia = 0
Nitrite = 0
Nitrate = 0
Phosphate = 0.25
Salinity = 1.03
PH = 8.2
Temp = 78

Jay Hemdal · Jun 4, 2025

bonniej said:
I am trying to save our Royal Gramma. He started to flash (rub his face on the rocks and sand) last Thursday. After researching, we did a fresh water dip on Friday and thought we saw some dead flukes come off him, but we are new to the hobby and not sure. He was still eating as if Saturday. We went to the LFS on Saturday and got API General Cure, which we put in Saturday evening, and again 48 hours later as instructed. He is still alive, breathing and occasionally moving from one hiding place to another, but he hasn’t been observed eating in a couple of days. He occasionally comes out and flashes once or twice but not as frantically as he did before the General Cure.

The tank has a watchman goby who flashed twice on Saturday and has been hiding a lot since the medication started, but seems totally normal today. Swimming and eating, no flashing. (The KFS said we could put the medication in with our main tank since the goby also flashed.)

We also have 2 clowns in the tank who seem unaffected by either flukes or the medication.

The questions are:
Should I do another treatment of General Cure?
If so, should I do a 25% water change before doing that, because that’s the last step of the instructions on the General Cure box.

21 gallon tank
Ammonia = 0
Nitrite = 0
Nitrate = 0
Phosphate = 0.25
Salinity = 1.03
PH = 8.2
Temp = 78

The timing listed on the box of General Cure is only for live bearing flukes. Egg laying flukes need a different spacing of the treatment in order to try and kill the adult flukes, then let the resting eggs hatch, and kill the new batch before they in turn have time to lay new eggs. It's tough to do! The spacing needs to be between 5 and 9 days. Very often, a third treatment is needed.

This post may offer you additional info:

Dosing Praziquantel (PZQ)

Using Praziquantel (PZQ) to treat flukes Overview In the early 1990’s, a researcher at the New York Aquarium published a paper on using Praziquantel (PZQ) to help control flukes, a parasitic flatworm. Also known as monogenean trematodes, these fish parasites can cause significant mortality in...

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