Nail Infection Treatment

Most people, when they talk about nail infection treatment, really mean fungal nail infection, or onychomycosis. This is because nail infections caused by bacteria are much more uncommon and generally clear up in their own or are so acute as to require immediate medical treatment. Fungus is different: it comes on slowly, spreads slowly, and causes few physical symptoms. Similarly, once established, it is hard to eradicate and often comes back.

Nail infection medicine, then, is generally aimed at the fungi that cause onychomycosis, and it takes many different forms ranging from old home cures to modern commercial drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies. People suffering from onychomycosis—and there are a lot of them—must make hard choices and it’s best that these choices be based on a good knowledge of the debate about nail infection treatment.

Prescription drugs are backed up by clinical trials which provide data about both effectiveness and safety. One might expect that, by now, good nail infection medicine would be readily available. Unfortunately, the prescription drugs available are not perfect: though newer drugs are safer, there’s still a risk of toxicity and other side effects, there’s a high rate of recurrence of infection, nail infection treatment takes many months, and the drugs are prohibitively expensive. Many people opt not to use the prescription medicines for any and all of these reasons.

Topical over-the-counter products used as nail infection medicine, meanwhile, work much better for fungal skin infections that for infected nails. These are topical preparations and they just don’t penetrate nail well enough to act on the fungus growing in the nail bed. Some possible exceptions that have appeared in recent years contain essential oils—oils of various herbs and spices, and especially tee tree oil, which seems to have some scientific evidence to back it up as a nail infection treatment.

Though onychomycosis seems to be more common now that it has been in the past, there have always been cases of it, and this has given rise to a number of home cures in alternative medicine and folklore. Unfortunately, evidence for the efficacy of this type of nail infection medicine is anecdotal: scientific study is almost completely lacking. The good thing about approaches based on folklore is that they usually involve everyday substances such as vinegar, beer, hydrogen peroxide, and mouthwash that are relatively cheap—an attempt at nail infection treatment using one of these will not cost much.

If you suspect that you have onychomycosis, you should consult a medical health professional for confirmation and information about safe nail infection treatment options.