We built this because we needed it.

Tickortreat was started by a family in southern Vermont — a place where pulling ticks off your kids after a day outside is just part of life. We run a farm. Our daughters play in the fields and the woods. Our dogs bring ticks in from the pasture. We know the drill.

One evening, after finding an engorged deer tick on one of our girls, we did what every parent in tick country does: panicked a little, Googled a lot, and tried to figure out how to get a single dose of doxycycline before the 72-hour window closed. Our pediatrician's office was closed. The ER felt absurd for something this simple.

We thought: there should be an easier way. So we built it.

Why this matters

The clinical solution already exists — a single dose of doxycycline, given within 72 hours of a high-risk tick bite, reduces the risk of Lyme disease by up to 87%. Yet in practice, this intervention is inconsistently applied. Many clinicians are unfamiliar with the protocol, hesitant to prescribe, or constrained by time and workflow. Even when prescribed, the available formats — large capsules or bitter liquid suspensions — are poorly suited for children.

The result is a gap between what is clinically known and what is operationally delivered. Tickortreat exists to close that gap.

Tick exposure is increasing in frequency, geography, and duration, driven by warming winters, expanding host populations, and changing land use. What was once a regional issue is becoming a broader and more urgent national problem. Nearly 500,000 Lyme disease cases are reported annually in the United States. As exposure increases, so does the need for a fast, standardized, and reliable response.

The difference between one dose and twenty-eight days of treatment is the difference between a five-minute problem and a month-long ordeal. For a child, it's the difference between one spoonful of flavored medicine and weeks of struggling with pills.

That's why the 72-hour window matters. That's why speed matters. And that's why we built Tickortreat.

Toad and Hen

Every good story needs characters. Ours are Toad and Hen — the doctor and the protector. We didn't choose them at random. Toads and chickens are two of nature's most effective tick predators — a single toad can eat thousands of insects in a season, and a small flock of chickens can reduce tick populations in a yard by up to 80%. On our farm, they're the front line of defense. On Tickortreat, they play the same role.

Toad is calm, no-nonsense, and always ready with a prescription. Hen is a fluffy white silkie who gathers everyone under her wings and teaches them how to stay safe.

Hen is based on a real bird.

One spring, a wild turkey nested in our goat pasture. When our livestock guardian dog scared the mother off, we rescued the clutch of eggs and slipped them under a broody white silkie in our coop. She hatched every one of them and raised them as her own. The turkey poults grew to twice her size but still followed her everywhere — she was their mother and they knew it. When the law required us to bring the turkeys to a wildlife rehabilitator, he actually asked us to lend him our silkie to keep mothering them until they were old enough to be released into the wild. We did. Once the turkeys were ready, he returned our hen. She came home and went right back to work.

That's Hen. She takes care of whoever needs it. She doesn't care if they're hers. She just does the work.

Hen the silkie with her mismatched brood of chicks

The illustrations

Everything you see on this site was illustrated by Louisa Conrad, a visual artist based in Townshend, Vermont. Louisa works in watercolor, pencil, and ink, and her work draws from the landscapes, animals, and daily textures of the farm where we live. The costumed ticks, the watchful Toad, the fierce little Hen — they're all hers.

You can see more of Louisa's work at louisaconrad.com.

One and Done.

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