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I have used cupramine on many dozens of fish/treatments at this point with great success. You are correct on dosing at a slower rate than the bottle recommends to ease the fish into the treatment and not shock them. I had issues at times when following the bottle and once I smoothed the dosing out those issues went away. On my bottle at least it's 16 drops per 10.5 gallons, so maybe they changed it. Either way, instead of dose, 48 hours, dose. Do 1/2 dose, 1/2 dose/ 1/2 dose, 1/2 dose. Or even better, do 1/4 dose morning and night for 4 days.
I won't necessarily recommend this, but I do not dose exactly to the bottle dose. Copper is therapeutic at .4-.5ppm and I believe the cupramine dosing is slightly over .5ppm if done in full. So I usually stop a few drops short to end up in the 95% of recommended dose because I do not test for copper in my QTs. I do the full 30 days of treatment, but you can do less if you transfer the fish to a different QT that is is sterile.
Of note, I only use pvc pipe and sponge filters in my qt tanks. Nothing that can absorb the medication.
I also think a huge key to success is having a biological filter that can handle the fish load in QT. Setting up a fresh QT and trying to control ammonia can work, but is much harder and leaves less room for air. Any ammonia will further stress/poison the fish. So all of my QT tanks are at least 40 gallon breeders and use seeded sponge filters I keep in my sump of my display, so they are fully colonized and capable of handling the fish load in qt immediately.
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Dustin
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