Have you ever had scabies?

Yes. You not only have to use the cream, from head to toe, as per the doctor’s orders, but you also have to wash everything you have in hot water, from clothes to bed linens, sleeping bags, and your cloth covered furniture and carpeting (actually, the furniture needs to be dealt with by an exterminator). If you don’t eliminate the bugs, you will just keep getting re-infested.

That being said, you may be picking them up from somewhere else. Your own car, someone else’s vehicle, or someone else’s home, or even at work. You need to know exactly where they are coming from to either solve the problem (or avoid it, if it’s not at your own home).

Also, make sure that you actually do have scabies. I had scabies when I was about 12 years old, and so did everyone else in my household. You could actually see the pattern of where the parasites were crawling under the skin.

Fast forward 40 years, and I somehow picked up bedbugs, but before we figured out that there were bedbugs (only in my room, and only in my mattress, no one else in our household had bites, or bugs anywhere else in the house) I was diagnosed by one doctor as having scabies, and was treated for that. The problem didn’t go away. After doing a lot of reading up on what my itchy bumps were from, I figured out that it was bedbugs, and had to have an exterminator come out and do a “heat treatment” of the whole house. They’re hard to spot, and we didn’t have them anywhere else, except in my mattress, and there were only a few of them that you could actually see. I probably picked them up somewhere else. I house sit a lot, so they could have come from there (although we had a bug man come out to my one friend’s home, where I stay often, and he didn’t have any signs of bedbugs) so I may have picked them up in an over night stay at a hotel, which apparently is fairly common these days. You can also pick them up from luggage, yours or someone else’s, especially if they’ve been in Europe, where bedbugs are much more common.

So first thing is find out if you actually have scabies, or if you were mis-diagnosed like I was.

If you do have scabies Here is Info to Eradicate Scabies

If you have bed bugs Your Options are Heat or Insecticide. It’s not really possible to get rid of bedbugs on your own, you really need a professional, who specifically deals with bedbug infestations.

It’s also possible that you have something else, and neither scabies or bedbugs. Do some research and see if you can nail it down. Good luck to you : )

I did once in my late teens, it was confined to the skin in between my toes and fingers. A doctor gave me some cream and it must have worked because I don’t recall anything else, which is not very helpful for you but Kardamom has given you a really informative answer so I hope that helps you find a solution to your problem.