Quarantine with vs. without medication

[ange]

I'm close to adding some fish to my 50g that I've been refurbishing and need to get things together for my quarantine tank. Over the course of several months I'm planning to bring in: angelfish, Bolivian rams, hatchetfish, and otocinclus in approximately that order. I have all of the quarantine hardware but have zero meds. I know Co-Op sells a med trio and many people dose aquarium salt but is it really necessary? I don't really like the idea of medicating for something that may not necessarily be present.

What do y'all do?

[Struggle]

I always quarantine with meds.

[Ben_RF]

If you are not going to get the trio, which I highly recommend, then I would strongly suggest doing atleast salt treatment while quarantining.  It really is just a pro-active step to medicate or salt treat because it is so common for diseases, parasites, and fungus to come in on fish and other aquatic animals. These are going to be your pets that you are going to love, so why not?

[Chandra]

It depends but I would highly recommend. I didn't know about the quarantine process, burned my hands! Let me share my experience as a beginner about this.
I always trusted my local store when I had my first few tanks based on their advice when I asked about cycling. When I pretended as if I didn't know about cycling, they told me the whole story correctly instead of vague answers like Petco that you can get fish on the same day. They do the quarantine process by monitoring fish but not treating them. So, if I saw a fish died in that tank, there are high chances to affect fishes in that tank. I bought some guppies and killies from the local store and didn't have any problem with so far. Same thing happened with Corydoras.
Some sellers have fish that lived for a few months in their tanks. If you can trust the seller, you can get the fishes without quarantine I think. However, there have been instances where they get diseased due to stress during transportation.
I recently got otocinclus from my local fish store and added them to my tank directly without any quarantine. However, out of 4, only two survived. I believe because most of them are wild-caught, making them carriers of worms and diseases from the wild. 
 After a week, I noticed one of my healthy killifish I had camallanus worms and died. My killie fish was healthy before that. Luckily, I had Levamisole from Greg Sage handy and treated my whole tanks. So far, all fish survived.
Here's what I do now after some lessons, every-time I add a medical dosage of salt and bring new fish, I monitor for the first two weeks, feed them well with frozen food or live food. Salt is good for osmoregulation and also helps treat few diseases. If I see any signs of illness like white poop, fish are not eating, white spots... etc., I hit them with meds accordingly. That's where the med trio was helpful. I was able to get my fish healthy without knowing what disease they had before after treating with meds.
I agree that treating the right disease is best instead of a shotgun approach, but there are very few diseases I can still identify after I got six tanks with about 80 fish.
Let me give you another approach I have been trying. I recently got rummy nose tetra (Couldn't resist seeing Cory's videos) from the Petco and hit them a med trio. Some of them had red gills that got cured, and few of them died. I was able to see capillary worms when I inspected a dead fish on a cheap microscope.Dosed with levamisole and the fish now are looking good and haven't had any deaths. So I was able to identify the disease and treat correctly but not always.
In summary, I would say for a beginner, it will take time to identify diseases and treat, but the success rate seems to be okay with the shotgun approach, too with the med trio. Irrespective of whether you treat or not, I would highly recommend monitoring them in a separate tank for 2-4 weeks before you go with adding them to the display tank. It is always handy to have meds too.

Edited September 12, 2020 by Chandra

[Ben Ellison]

I get the may or may not be present idea. However, the conditions almost all lfs or box store fish are raised and handled means you have a very good chance they have at least some issue. The meds also do not harm the fish. Cory has used them on thousands of fish and I've used on close to a hundred with no harm to any. I'd highly recommend you treat them.

[ange]

I'm honestly a bit surprised that so many people medicate. I've used aquarium salt in the past for treating disease (never had to deal with it in my main tank though). The reason I have never done medication is I feel like preemptive use of antibiotics isn't the right thing to do.

I'm definitely going to at least be dealing with ich in my upcoming quarantines so I'm preparing to have Ich-X, my LFS warned me that they usually don't get hatchetfish from their wholesaler because of how often the shipments come in with active cases. I just really have trouble getting past the idea of resistant bacteria to do something like maracyn just on the off chance that a fish is carrying something.

Thanks for the insight 😕

[Kat_Rigel]

I quarantine, but don't medicate unless I see issues. It just seems unnecessary. Plus, it is a stress on their system. I guess you can argue that if they are healthy, they can handle it and if they are unhealthy, well then they needed the meds anyway. Personally it just seems like a lot of work (water changes, dosing) for not much reward. I think the risk I am taking of losing fish during quarantine because I didn't proactively medicate is low. And I think the odds are low that an issue will not show up in 4 weeks of quarantine, but will show up after and infect my tank after adding them.

Plus, thats more 🤑🤑🤑 and I am cheap. 😁

[RyanR]

I understand the argument against medicating quarantine fish for no reason.  It's sort of like a human randomly taking antibiotics for no reason.  But on the flip side, I look at like a vaccine.  I don't know where the fish have come from and I don't want to throw them into a tank full of fish and I don't want to wait 2-3 weeks to put them in my display tank.  So, I medicate my fish in quarantine.  My fish aren't going to leave my house, so I'm not worried about creating a super virus.  That's my reasoning for quarantining with meds.