This is what I did, not telling you what to do because I am new myself. I have been in this hobby only a couple months. The first set of fish I bought, did fine for a month. Than I went and bought the cool looking pictus catfish from petsmart. Within a day or 2 he and my redtail shark 2 bala sharks and both my gouramis were covered in white spots. I bought the walmart ick medicine that says to use the half dose on scaless fish. Within a day all my scaless fish were dead even at using a smalller dose than the recomended for the scaless. I did a huge water change and waited a few days. more and more spots were forming and bought a new medicine called ick clear. I added the recommended doses for scaless fish because I still had one scaless fish left in the tank. My pleco. All but my pleco and my paradise fish lived. They all died from what I believe the medicine I was using. I followed the directions to a tee and started treating as soon as I seen the spots on my fish. I look at my fish very frequently as it is next to my computer and watch them for hours and hours every day. So now I have 3 fish left, none got the ick from the pictus, but the pictus from PETSMART gave my whole tank ick and lost a bunch of them. I leave the tank for 2 weeks and my paradise gets ick. I read on the internet to raise temperature slowly to 86 degrees and I added 1 tablespoon of non iodized table salt to my fish tank per 5 gallons. a few days later ick is gone and keep the temperature up at 86 for 2 weeks. All ick is gone and I slowly lower my temp back down to 82 degrees and vacuum gravel alot during them 2 weeks and I since than for the past month and a half use table salt in my fresh water tank and my fish are doing awesome. Since I have been using salt I added 1 redtail shark, 2 silver dollars and an albino shark and not 1 of them has had ick. I will never ever use another medication that says treat ick. What I will do is keep table salt in my water and increase the temp to 86 slowly as ick cannot live in 86 degrees from what I hear. But for the past month and a half and even adding some fish since I have salt in my tank I have had no problems. Another thing, I will never buy another fish from petsmart. Hope my story helped.
Joe
