Man I’m so glad I live somewhere with few if any ticks. They sound horrible from everything I’ve read.
You don't notice when you've been bitten, and if you get into the habit of checking yourself all over before bedtime, you can usually remove them fairly easily with alcohol. The risk is leaving bits and pieces behind when you pull them off, which is why you want to encourage them to let go on their own.
I thought the reason was if you accidentally apply pressure to the engorged tick, it backflows the potentially lyme-contaminated blood into your person.
They sell special tweezers which engage the head while avoiding the body for this reason AIUI.
So I guess the recommendation remains: remove with tweezers carefully, targeting the head so as to avoid sqeezing the body and flushing toxins back into your body. Which is easier than heading to a drugstore for freezing wart removers anyway.
Joking aside I think alcohol was supposed to be just for disinfecting and some people took it wrong way ?
The trick is to grab them near the skin, without using too much force, and pull them with the minimum amount of force that works (go increasing the force until they move).
People using tweezers also invariably do it wrong, because tweezers are not an instrument for delicately handling things.
We seriously need to find a way to get rid of biting insects on a grand scale.
Totally no reason to have any of these around. Any ecological niches they are taking should be left to those who do not prey on human.
All old folk-remedy things with butter and alcohol only risks the tick to go into shock and spew saliva into you, increasing the risk for lyme disease/tbe or borrelia.
Just pull it straight out, it's safe and easy, done it a dozen times.
Also get vaccine for lyme disease if you are in an area where ticks pass it on, it is a horribly crippling disease and not worth the risk however low.
Admittedly, there are a lot of articles saying "Don't try to suffocate or irritate the tick before pulling it out." They are written by doctors who have never actually had a tick bite. Once the tick is firmly attached, which takes several hours, you will often be unable to remove it cleanly without chemical assistance of one sort or another.
We used coal-tar ointment (ichthammol) for that back in the day [2]. Some say alcohol works just as well, others say differently. The suggestion elsewhere in the thread to freeze them off with wart remover sounds like it could work well. For me personally, the ultimate remedy was G'ing TFO of that part of the country.
1: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2017.0028...
Interestingly, you need to turn them clockwise for ages before they let go, but counter-clockwise gets them out after a single rotation.
She did get both lyme disease and encephalitis (mostly spread in Central Europe), but she did spend ~70 years foraging for blueberries and mushrooms..
I also do it (but probably on hundreds not thousands) and never caught anything.