Ingrown toenails are a small injury that can cause a lot of foot pain. An ingrown toenail occurs when your toenail presses horizontally into the flesh of your toe, instead extending forward as it’s supposed to grow. Preventing ingrown toenails is ideal, but you can also treat them once they set. Below, we share five tips to help prevent and treat the formation of ingrown toenails.
1. Loose Shoes – Whether we’re helping you find baseball cleats, sandals or heels, one of the common themes seems to be finding a shoe that fits right. Your shoe needs to be snug enough to prevent your ankle from rolling, but it also needs to be loose enough that your toes aren’t crunched together in the toe. You likely won’t have a problem finding an everyday shoe that fits well, but shoes for certain sports can exascerbate ingrown toenail symptoms. Soccer shoes are particularly problematic, so ensure your son or daughter gets their athletic shoes fitted by a professional, and opt for shoes you can try on before you buy, instead of buying online.
2. Nail Care – Another big reason why ingrown toenails form is because a person cuts their nail down too low or at an awkward ankle. You want to cut straight across your toenails when trimming your nails. If you try to round the edges, you’re inviting your nail to grow at a bad angle.
3. Soak – If an ingrown toenail sets in, you’re going to deal with a variety of symptoms, including:
- Swelling
- Redness
- Pain to the touch
- Puffiness
- Drainage
To alleviate some of the early symptoms, give your foot a 15-minute soak in a salt water bath. This will help relieve some pain and swelling, and keeping the area clean will help prevent an infection.
4. Toenail Care Part 2 – A lot of times patients will come to me after attempting to fix their painful nail on their own, but they only tried a short-term fix, not a long term solution. Imagine your toenail is a train, and it’s supposed to stay moving forward on the tracks. An ingrown toenail occurs when the train derails and starts to go off to the side. When this happens, the goal isn’t to try and remove the tip of the painful nail, because the train is going to keep coming. You might have relief for a few days, but eventually you’re going to be right back at square one. Instead, you’ve got to get the train back on the track.
To do this, you’ll want to get a nail file or another small tool and try to pull the painful toenail up and away from the skin. The best time to do this is after you’ve let your foot soak, as the nail and the skin around the nail will be softer. If you can’t seem to get the nail back on the rail, proceed to step five.
5. See a Professional – A colleague of mine has had 6-8 ingrown toenail surgeries, and he swears by the relief it provides (why he continued to wear ill-fitting soccer and baseball cleats, I’ll never understand). The procedure involves placing a small tourniquet on the toe, injecting the toe with a numbing agent, and the cutting the ingrown toenail away, usually down to the base of the toe. This provides almost instant relief, patients walk out of the office and they are typically fully pain-free 24-48 hours after the procedure. If you opt for the procedure, speak with your physician about ways to keep your exposed nail bed infection-free after the operation.