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  • Please Note - Medical Advice

    Please keep in mind that posts on this forum are from members of the public sharing personal opinions. It is not a replacement for qualified medical advice from a veterinarian. Many illnesses share similar symptoms but require different treatments. A medical exam is necessary for an accurate diagnosis, without which appropriate treatment cannot be given.

    You should always consult your vet before following any suggestions for medication or treatment you have read about. The wrong treatment could make your rabbit worse or mean your vet is unable to give the correct treatment because of drug interactions. Even non prescription drugs can do harm if given inappropriately.

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Calpol

beckiboo186

Warren Veteran
Hi. I have been told that if a rabbit seems a bit unwell, then you can use baby calpol?? This to me seems full of sugar, so before i go and buy some, has anyone else used it? xx
 
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wouldn't recommend it as, unless you're a vet, would you be able to know the actual cause of the illness? If a rabbit "seems" unwell it could be for a huge amount of different reasons.
There have been a lot of posts on here recently with people asking if they can feed their rabbits all sorts of things that contain lots of sugar. The advice given has always been NO!
 
I wondered that too Becki :?

I did hear that you could use aspirin, but I'm not sure on dosage
 
YOU SHOULD NEVER USE HUMAN MEDICATION ON ANIMALS, Calpol should not be used on rabbits and if you feel your rabbit is in pain take it to the vets imediately!

eve x
 
I'm afraid I don't know enough about rabbits yet to offer advice but I do know that you get can get sugar free Calpol or Boots own baby paracetemol if thats of any help to you.Best wishes
 
two of my friends who keep buns told me about using baby calpol, and another person off a forum on net told me aswell?! I wont do now obviously :?
 
I was advised by chrissie to use baby calpol on my guinea pig, aswell as calgel not sure about rabbits tho
 
hi

you can get sugar-free calpol like Katie says, but paracetamol is listed as poisonous to cats, so it often comes up as poisonous - the thing is that 'poisonous' means very little - could mean a sore mouth to liver failure - As paracetamol overdose causes liver failure in humans, and rabbits have very delicate livers, I would avoid paracetomol and use asprin if you have to - I heard from one of the experienced members of the forum that quarter of an asprin is pain relief for a rabbit - but asprin has blood-thinning properties so wouldn't be advisable after an operation, and asprin also causes stomach ulcers, so really it's best to go to your vet and get some proper bunny painkiller like metacam!

As for never using human meds on animals - the vet told me yesterday that they had run out of a vital pre-op sedative because it was only licensed for human use, and had been withdrawn from the market a year ago - she said they'd had to get it tested and relicenced for animal use and it had only just been approved - prior to that they'd used it successfully for years although it was a human med. It's all down to the drug companies and which market they can make most money out of :wink:
 
do you think you may have got confused and are thinking of infacol! baby gripe!?

please do NOT use calpol, we would not take our rabbits to the vet for metacam if we could go to the fridge and use calpol!
 
hi

I think paracetamol is recommended for rats and rodents, but I've only ever seen asprin on a list for bunnies - I'd prefer to go to the vets.
 
and on a complete side note, aspirin is deadly poisonous to cats! I suspect that somewhere back down the line of chinese whispers with your friends, it was infacol and it turned into calpol somewhere along the line!
 
i thought i'd read somewhere on this forum that you could use calpol for rabbits, don't know where i read it though...
 
You should never give medicine because your rabbit "seems unwell" at worst you could kill it. If it does work then you could end up masking symptoms. For example a painkiller might make your rabbit act better for a couple of hours but if you haven't treated the under lying problem then you've just delayed getting treatment by a couple of hours.

By the time a rabbits is showing symptoms of being ill it is usually quite sick as they tend to hide illness well.

Very occationally a vet might perscribe something you have to pick up from a human parmacy but you shouldn't use human drugs on rabbits without vet advice.

Doses are very hard to calculate in small animals and weight isn't the only determining factor. Just dividing/multiplying human weights to get doses doesn't necessarily work as rabbit metabolic rates and bodies are very different to humans.

Tamsin
 
This is the best list to see what medications buns can have. As everyone else has said though, it is best to always get a vets opinion first either by taking bun to surgery or speaking to vet over the phone.
We always have Metacam in but we are nursing sick buns continually so that is different - however, we still get a vets opinion :D
This list is also a good way of finding out if your vet knows what they are doing with buns :!:
Here is the link: http://www.medirabbit.com/Safe_medication/Analgesics/safe_analgesics.htm
 
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