disease, maybe ick

Question
i think my fish have that ick disease or something like that.  the last time this happened, the fish store gave me something to add to the tank.  it seemed to have cleared it up.  then it happened a 2nd time and i thought it was gone.  Now we are on 3 times of seeing this within the last couple of months.  Every day when i turn the tank lights on and again when i feed them later i always check to make sure everyone looks heathly and acting normal.  everyone has seemed fine for the last few weeks at the least.  now all of a sudden the fire mouth cichlids have white spots on their faces and the fire eel has one little spot.  the other fire eel seems unaffected.  I havent intruced any new fish in quite a while and i dont put any live foods in the tank. no plants. am i not getting rid of it or is it coming back somehow?  this has never seemed to be a problem in the past. what do i do?

Answer
The first thing I would do is check your water conditions to make sure that the environment is setup correctly and not stressing your fish.  If it is Ick poor water conditions will cause outbreaks to continue. A good treatment method that does two things, one boot the fish immune system and two kill off the parasites is adding 1 tablespoon of aquarium salt per gallon of water, increase the temperature in the tank to about 82F and keep it like this for about 4 days, at this point do a 20% water change and in another 4 days do another 20% water change and start to lower the aquarium temperature back down to 78F.  In another 4 days do another 20% water change and then go to standard weekly water changes of 15%.  This creates a false environment for the parasites and kills them off fairly quickly.