Treating Onychomycosis

Onychomycosis is the medical term for fungal infection of nails—finger nails or toenails—and treating onychomycosis is a puzzle that people have been struggling with for centuries. The problem is that once a fungus is well established, growing in the matrix of the nail, it’s hard to get rid of and it tends to keep coming back. Even in our twenty-first century world of medical miracles, nail fungus is a stubborn problem for many many people.

The first step toward an onychomycosis cure is to confirm the diagnosis. There are a number of different infections and medical conditions that cause deformity and discoloration in nails, and many can look disturbingly like onychomycosis. Because of this, consultation with a medical professional who can differentiate and diagnose is important. Treating onychomycosis, of course, requires a different approach from treating the other possibilities.

Once the diagnosis is confirmed, the physician will probably offer a prescription drug for treating onychomycosis—these range from oral medications such as Lamicil, Sporanox, and Diflucan to a topical nail lacquer called Penlac. These drugs are undoubtedly safer and more effective than prescription antifungals have been in the past; however, many people don’t choose this option because of cost, concerns about side effects, and the lack of a guarantee of onychomycosis cure. There simply is no treatment currently known that is guaranteed to work.

Among the over-the-counter products that promise an onychomycosis cure, the best choices currently seem to be topical preparations made from essential oils. The idea here is that plants, which must defend themselves against fungal attack in nature, produce compounds with antifungal properties that are useful in treating onychomycosis in people. Some essential plant oils, notably tee tree oil, have undergone extensive testing in scientific laboratories and the evidence suggests that these antifungal compounds do indeed exist. Encouragingly, essential oils also appear to have antibacterial and antiviral properties, while being relatively harmless when applied topically to human infections.

Anyone undergoing onychomycosis cure should remain under the supervision of a medical professional and use antifungal preparations only as directed.