With the kids heading back to school, head lice are about to start finding new territory. But some lice are resistant to the insecticides used to kill them. In a new study, a doctor in California suggests another way to exterminate the denizens of your children's head: suffocating them with a product called Nuvo lotion.

What the researcher wanted to know: Does a dry-on, suffocation-based insecticide (or "pediculicide"—it means "thing that kills lice") kill lice?

What he did: The doctor asked pediatricians in the area to send him their hard-to-treat head lice cases—either another method of killing lice had failed, or the parents didn't want to use toxic treatments on their kids' scalps. The nontoxic lotion is put on wet, then dried with a hair dryer; it's supposed to cover the lice like shrink-wrap and plug their little breathing holes. Parents applied the lotion at home, once a week for up to three weeks.

What he found: The lotion worked on 96 percent of kids; 94 percent were still lice free six months later. That's as good or better than commonly used insecticides. Also, removing the nits by hand didn't add anything, and the treatment was successful even without major housecleaning.

What the study means to you: This seems to work pretty well. Another bonus is that a treatment like this is less likely to make the lice evolve resistance, since it kills them by a brute mechanical means—suffocation—instead of by targeting a specific molecule that could mutate.

Caveats: The doctor who carried out the study also owns the patent on the lotion.

Find out more: Information on head lice from the Harvard School of Public Health: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/

Read the article: Pearlman, D.L. "A Simple Treatment for Head Lice: Dry-On, Suffocation-Based Pediculicide." Pediatrics. September 2004, Vol. 114, No. 3, pp. e275–e279.

Abstract online: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org