The actual cause of "dropsy" is not well defined. Dropsy is a description of symptoms, not a disease as such. It is especially difficult to treat for the simple reason that the symptoms can be seen with many different causes. The basic pine-coning symptom allows many of us to say dropsy with no reservations but that does not give you an effective treatment regime. Think for a moment about the human condition called pneumonia. Pneumonia, simply stated, means that the breathing passages of people are swollen out of the "normal" condition. OK so what does that mean in terms of treatment? One way of looking at things is to treat symptoms and simply give the patients anti-inflammatory drugs. No doubt that will work with some people by treating the symptoms. For other people the treatment will have no effect. Now let us decide that some cases or pneumonia result from bacterial infections of the various components involved in breathing. Simple antibacterial treatments will take care of those cases. Let us now look at the results of treatments. Antibacterial treatments were the ideal treatment in some cases and anti-inflammatory treatments were the ones most likely to be successful in others. Now let's go back to dropsy. Dropsy can be the result of almost anything that might cause the symptom of swelling of the fish. It is a symptom, not a disease as such. The result is that various treatments may or may not help for a given expression of dropsy symptoms.
One of the toughest things in treating dropsy is determining what the real problem may be, not the symptom.
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