Ingrown toenails can be painful, increase your risk of infection, and put diabetic feet at risk for serious medical complications. Clearly, these are not something you want to leave unaddressed!
When it comes to treatment for an ingrown nail, you may have heard surgery is the best option. Well, let’s look at why this actually may or may not be true.
Whether surgery is your best option for an ingrown nail will depend on a couple of different factors. That said, it’s important to understand surgery is something we generally only recommend—no matter the condition—when there are no other options.
In the case of ingrown toenails, we may be able to resolve the problem with conservative care. Again, this will depend on your particular case, but you might simply need to have the ingrown portion of the nail gently lifted and then kept in place so the nail will grow over the skin, instead of into it. (As a note, it can be helpful to first soften the nail by soaking the affected foot first.)
Typically, surgery for an ingrown toenail is only needed for conditions that are recurrent and/or causing severe pain.
Between the two, it’s more likely that we will recommend surgical intervention to address a recurrent case. This is because the nail continually becomes ingrown on account of an unusually curved nail structure. Since the curvature is atypical, the problem will continue to arise.
After we have removed the toenail, we might take measures to keep it from growing back. We don’t want you to keep dealing with the same pain and discomfort over and over again, so we can perform a procedure to render the nail matrix—which generates new nail tissue—inoperable on a permanent basis.
For more information about ingrown toenail treatment—surgical or otherwise—contact Massapequa Podiatry Associates. Call us at (516) 541-9000 or take advantage of our online form to connect with us. If you are suffering from a painful ingrown toenail (or a different foot or ankle problem), request an appointment and we will create a treatment plan to resolve it for you.