At the first sign of a black spot on your toe nail, you should stop wearing socks or stockings that don’t allow the toe to be air dried or that allows the natural sweating of your feet to mix with a virus known as toe nail fungus. That black/yellow spot on your nail is actually dead nail and the skin underneath that nail is growing a fungus much like a tree that gets infected with fungus on its bark. The virus is a living organism that is looking for a place to root in your skin. Your feet if not kept clean and dry will be a likely place for the virus to attack. Once it has rooted underneath your toe nails, it is not a simple matter to kill the virus attack.
Your first step is to soak your feet in epsom salts. Dry your feet thoroughly and get an over the counter pedicure kit and work the gritty preparation into all of your toes and into your toe nails. Follow by rinsing your feet and drying them thoroughly. Your next step is to use a toe nail scissors and cut your toe nails in a rounded fashion close to the skin. Do not hurt yourself by trying to cut out all of the black nail or to cut out the fungus.
If you don’t want to buy a pedicure product from a pharmacy, or to get a professional pedicure, using a brush on all of your toe nails should get rid of the dead skin. Dry your feet and use a cotton ball saturated with hydrogen peroxide on each toe and try to get as much of the hydrogen peroxide into your infected toe nail as possible. What you are trying to do is to make it impossible for the fungus or virus to continue feeding on your toe nail. A foot bath of cold water and baking soda also helps. If all of these treatments don’t work, Dr. Scholl’s over the counter foot products has a good treatment for toe nail fungus. Follow the instruction on the package.
If, after two weeks of home treatments and over the counter fungus killing preparations, your toe nail fungus does not show any improvement, visit a podiatrist. If the entire toe is blackened and the skin underneath is raw, only a podiatrist can help you to either save your toe nail or have it removed. These decisions should be made by a qualified foot doctor. You can tell if the toe nail is dead by cutting up to the skin. If you have no feeling if your press a nail file underneath the skin where you ended your toe nail cutting, your toe nail is dead and really should be removed.
You can also prevent outbreaks of toe nail fungus by keeping your shower tray or bathtub clean and sprayed with a disinfectant. Virus’s grow in damp conditions mixed with dead skin that are often residue on top of shower trays or bathtubs. Keeping your wash area clean and dry and keeping your toes clean and dry and not in heavy socks and shoes that retain moisture and breed virus’s or fungus is the best preventive measure to toe nail fungus that your can do.







