Fungal Nails
One of the most common conditions we see in our practice are fungus toenails called mycotic nails. They are a disease. They are a true disease of the nail where the fungus lives in and under the nail and the nail bed. The reason why it is so common is our feet are not supposed to be in shoes. Fungus is caused from sweating. It is like watering your lawn. If you water it too much and you water at night mushrooms grow. Fungus loves dark and wet environment and that is why we see it on the nails. It is also part of the aging process or for various reasons it is also very common in diabetics. There are various ways to treat it. It absolutely should be treated since it is a disease. It is progressive and it will get worse. I often hear from patients you know I have heard that medication Lamisil or that other oral medications can hurt you. They work and it is an extremely rare episode where a patient has a problem or should not be on it. That is why we do blood work and other things but the vast majority of patients don’t want to go on the medication. We have a toolkit. You need a multidiscipline approach to get fungal toenails better. Some people say well topical don’t work the stuff you paint on. We treat the feet we treat the shoes. There are some minerals that you can take. We have a way to get fungus toenails significantly better. Now the topical modality that we just spoke about generally will not get rid of them totally in the vast majority of cases. But you should treat this disease because it will get worse. When it gets worse the harder it is to get better number one. Number two in the case of diabetics the fungus toenails can often cause breaks in the skin know as ulcerations. That is how we run into infections, loss of toes, and things like that. So, simple prevention can help this. We want to help you not pass it on whether it be your spouse or your siblings anybody else is in your household. So, it is all about education but you need to treat it. Some people like to treat it with the medication and that should eradicate it. But there are many many other ways. We get a lot of questions about the lasers for nail and at this point there is not one that is FDA approved totally for treatment of fungus toenails and until that time comes and until we see long term studies we are not going to go out there gauge our patients and charge them for something that we don’t believe in. You can email us anytime on our websites with any questions. We are here for you.
