In the treatment of scabies, factors like the age of the patient, the overall health, the stage of progression of the skin condition, the accuracy of the diagnosis and the promptness of the medical intervention are crucial and can make the difference between an efficient treatment and a not efficient one. In healthy patients, the eradication of the parasitic mites, takes 10 days of properly administrated treatment while the treatment for existing scabies in other categories of patients is slower. For people with affected immune system, for young children and old people the treatment for eradicating the scabies mites is less efficient. For those categories of patients, the treatments are more laborious and require a longer period of administration until the effects are reached. The prescriptions will include both external use medications (creams, gels and lotions) and oral use medications (capsules or tablets) for a greater efficiency.

All the patients should take into consideration that the treatment for scabies means eliminating the scabies mites and not alleviating the symptoms. It is very rarely that a medicine for scabies mites includes other pharmaceutical agents to control the existing symptoms of the condition. The symptoms of scabies may persist for as long as two weeks after the mites were killed. One of the reasons for this effect is that even if the treatment includes medicines meant to control the symptoms, those will not stop showing until the organism will eliminate the toxic elements that produce the actual allergic reactions, which remained from the activity of the mites: feces, saliva, inactive eggs, dead mites or their carcasses.

The timing in diagnosing the scabies is of crucial importance. The sooner the diagnosis is reached, the better the body will response to the treatment. Also the accuracy of the diagnosis matters because it is hard for a doctor to reach the correct diagnosis based on the clinical examination and the patient's reports of the symptoms. The symptoms may lead to a different diagnosis like eczema, chicken pox or dermatitis because of the unspecific character of the symptoms. A correct and reliable diagnosis can only be concluded after clear signs of scabies mites' infestation have been found. These signs can be found after a thorough examination under the microscope of a sample from the affected skin area for mites' eggs or feces. However, this procedure is not painful or difficult for the patient because the sample is collected from the superficial layers of the infected skin.

The difference between a treatment given in the early stages of the infestation, when the mites are killed before they get the chance to reproduce and proliferate and a late prescribed treatment is that after the disease has spread and the skin has been infested, the external use medicines with local effects will not be efficient due to the formation of crusts over the infested skin protecting against a proper absorption of the medication into the skin, canceling thus its effect. Also, if the treatment is prescribed in an early stage, the contagious character of the disease is canceled, giving the possibility of protecting the people around the patient. This is the relation and the importance between the speed of the diagnosis and treatment and the effects of the treatment.