I have not used this specific med, but I have used a lot of others over the years. Two things occur to me from reading what SeaChem states.
Firstly, this is what SeaChem says about tis med: " PolyGuard is among Seachem’s strongest medications, and is best used when you are unsure what disease you are treating or when the fish is suffering from multiple infections." So there are three important facts here:
1. This medication is pretty strong.
2. It is designed for those cases where a fish is in bad shape and one has no idea what the cause might be.
3. There is a mixture of different medications in this one med.
This tells us we should be using this med when we have one or more fish that is in really bad shape and we feel we must do something of it will likely die. Despite saying mixing meds is not a good idea, they are suggesting in critical situations with high uncertainty, doing this is OK. We also should assume that SeaChem is not going to offer sa mixture of meds that will clearly interact badly and actually do more harm than good.
So, if one has a very sick fish and no ideawhat is causing it. Is it better to use the shotgun approach of this med or might there be a better way? This is up to each fish keeper to decide for themselves.
What I do know is that the more meds one combines and the stronger any med is, the greater the risks. And example is malachite green. One of the most effective treatments for Ich and also one of the more potentially dangerous. For some species it must be used at half strength and not at all for a few. Since there is such a great variety of FW species that we may keep in our tanks and how different they are from each other in many cases, it is difficult to consider any chemical added to a tank as being guaranteed to be both safe and effective.
My conclusion here is the only way to know the answer would be if we know which fish need to be treated and then to research how they react to each of the ingredients. This will become a bit complicated by the amounts of each ingredient since with some things a small dose is safe while a bigger one is not.
Finally, when we have to treat sick fish when we know what the problem is and what the needed treatment options are as well, we have two options. We can either treat the entire tank or we can remove the affected fish and treat them in a hospital setting. An H tank means that those fish not sick wont be exposed to a treatment they do not need. But Polyguard is a strong med and for situations where we are not sure of the nature of the problem. So an H tank is not really an option, imo.
I am sure I have not left you with a good answer, But I am hoping I have raised some thngs one needs to consider in deciding if they want to use this med. What I can say is I have several of the individual medications contained in Polyguard in my fish med kit or I have used them in the past.
