You’re a good Consumerist. You make your own kids at home. You grow your own lice in a coffee can you found on the street. You dump the lice on the kids’ heads before you send them off to school. After all that, the last thing you want to do is spend a fortune on lice removal treatments, right? You’re in luck: the New York Times says you don’t have to spend a lot of money de-lousing your itchy little child.

Try the Cetaphil approach (along with combing) if you want to avoid medicinal shampoos–apply Cetaphil to a child’s dry hair, use a hair dryer to dry it, leave it in overnight, and repeat once a week for two more weeks. Also, any finely-tined comb will work, so don’t spend a lot of money on a special steel one.

The article also notes that lice aren’t anywhere near as hard to get rid of as bedbugs, so don’t throw money at an exterminator: “A louse can live no longer than 36 hours without a host. So if it does migrate to a bed or carpet, and doesn’t find another head to crawl onto, it will die soon.”

“Defeating the Lice Without Emptying Your Wallet” [New York Times]

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