The LiceDoctors technician was prompt, kind, and did remove a lot of lice and nits. She gave us a good start. But to explain why there is only one star, lets go through their promises:
Stress-Free
LiceDoctors claims on its web site that the technician will take the burden of the lice situation off you, but after the treatment, you're given a 3-week follow-up plan, which requires saturating the hair in olive oil, running the lice comb through the hair, sleeping in the oil with a shower cap on, and then rinsing all the oil out the next morning, not once but every night for the first 3 nights and then, depending on the severity of the initial infestation, either 2 or 4 times after that on designated nights during the following three weeks. Then every few days in between the oil treatments, for the full 3 weeks, you're supposed to inspect the dry hair for nits and pick them out with your fingers. So, the visit from LiceDoctors is just the beginning of a 3-week saga in which you're the one who ensures that every louse and nit is gone. And all those oil applications, checks, and washings are extremely time-consuming, messy, and stressful. Hanging over your head the whole time is, what if I miss one? Which leads to their next claim ...
Effectiveness
LiceDoctors claims that their treatment has proven effective on over 350,000 clients. The whole time the technician was working on my daughter's hair, she said how important it is to use a professional and how parents often miss nits. But here's the thing -- the effectiveness of LiceDoctors' approach depends on the follow-up plan, which is done by you, the non-professional. For the first week, I followed the plan religiously. I even went beyond what was recommended and checked my daughter's dry hair every non-oil night for almost 2 hours determined to catch every nit. And with each oil treatment and dry check I found fewer and fewer lice and nits, and on Day 7 after the initial visit I found nothing. I was elated. We were lice-free. Only we weren't, because the following day, my daughter's school happened to have their routine lice check and the company doing the check found more nits in her hair. I had missed them. So, the technician had been right -- a professional is needed to find all the nits; a parent/non-professional will likely miss some. And yet, here I was, a non-professional, being the one left to catch every last nit. Which left us in a quandary because of LiceDoctors' guarantee...
Guarantee
LiceDoctors guarantees that if you adhere to the follow-up plan, you will be lice- and nit-free, and if after completing the follow-up plan, you are not lice- and nit-free, then they'll treat you again at no charge. But, if you insist on a recheck before completing the follow-up plan, you'll be charged a reduced hourly fee. So, once it became clear that I was not qualified to catch all the nits, our options were -- continue with the labor-intensive plan for another 2 weeks and risk the missed nits producing another live lice infestation, or pay more to have the technician come back and remove the missed nits. At that point, I couldn't imagine going through 2-hour inspections each night for another 2 weeks with no confidence I'd catch all the nits before they turned into live lice and since we'd have to pay someone to come back anyway, we ended up enlisting the help of another lice removal service. They found more nits, removed them, and guaranteed we were lice-free with no extra work on our part required, which put into question another of LiceDoctors' claims.
Chemical-Free
According to the LiceDoctors web site, the technician uses a chemical-free protocol, and it is -- oil and combing. No chemicals there. But, unless you want to walk around with olive oil in your hair forever, you need a really good degreaser and that comes in the form of dishwashing liquid. The organic natural stuff won't cut it. We tried so hard to make the safer less-toxic varieties of dishwashing liquid and soaps remove the oil, but they just can't cut through the copious amounts of oil the LiceDoctors treatment requires. You have to use the regular dishwashing liquid that contains all those chemicals us natural types try to avoid. And, we'd have to use it 8 times. Chemical-wise we'd have been better off with a service that used a chemical shampoo and got rid of the lice in one or two visits.
Cost
The cost is what prompted me to write this review. LiceDoctors charges by the hour, and it took the technician over four hours to check our entire family (which is required for the guarantee) and treat those of us who had lice. When we saw the final charge, we were devastated. $850! And we weren't even lice-free.
Bottom line: When looking for a lice removal service, find one that guarantees, without any follow-up plan, no nits or lice after one or two visits, and that charges a flat fee. There are services like that out there. LiceDoctors is not one of them. read more