Toenails

Top: left foot treated with amorolfine nail lacquer.




Left big toe, Amorolfine nail lacquer. Note how still-infected thicker nail has grown out halfway.

Right foot, daily application of lamisil single-dose 1 % solution, same stuff that left my fingernails 99% cured in about 4 months.

Right toenail, lamisil. Thick nail has grown out halfway. The red dots are marks from going a bit hard with the grinding machine

Will file them down again (not excited about it, it is a boring and tiring process) and continue treatment. The treatment that is least successful I will discontinue and I will keep doing what works, be it amorolfine or terbinafine. On the foot that is not doing best I will try a new treatment, not sure what yet. We'll see.


EDIT: I checked out my first post from august 2009 with pictures from then. I had forgotten how bad it was, my toenails have actually come a looong way! Both feet, although still infected, have improved enormously. Fantastic. :D

Popular and heavily advertised fungus remedies

There are many "alternative treatments" around that you see advertised everywhere whenever you browse the web to read on the subject of onychomycosis, ringworm of the nail, or whatever one chooses to call one's nail fungus. Examples include funginix, zetaclear and nonyx nail gel. Let's look at a couple of these.

Nonyx nail gel is manufactured by the Xenna corporation and seems to sell quite well. Here are the ingredients according to their own website:

* Deionized Water,
* Ethanoic Acid,
* Xanthan Gum,
* Fragrance

Deionized sounds fancy, but the thing is it is basically just clean water. Water that has gone through filters to remove any minerals in it, it is about as clean as distilled water but cheaper to produce in large quantities.

In short: it’s just water.

Ethanoic acid also sound fancy. Thing is: it is just another name for acetic acid. And acetic acid happens to be:

Household vinegar. So they could have just written “vinegar”.

Xanthan gum sounds really interesting and I had to check it out. This happens to be a normal, common food additive that is used for raising the viscosity of a fluid, in simple words: It is used for making stuff thicker. Kinda like gelatine in jello.

So what we are supposed to pay for here is really: Water, vinegar, thickener, all of which you probably have in your kitchen. And some perfume for the scent… 30-40 dollars for this.

I would not call this a scam since vinegar actually does clear away keratin debris buildup and seems to be able to kill fungal spores in the nail. But it is ridiculously expensive for a water-vinegar mixture and it is obvious why they choose not to write "common vinegar" on the bottle.

Zetaclear:

Zetaclear is a huge presence in the googlesphere, but as any other of these "treatments" it is not proven to be efficient in any studies whatsoever, consumers have nothing to base their opinion upon except the company's own information, and that information is false.

And there is a problem: Zetaclear is being marketed extremely aggressively and in a dishonest way. Google "zetaclear" and you get dozens (!) of URLs such as www.zetaclearwarning.com and www.zetaclearreviewssite.com . All of these are scams and it is very obvious as the so-called "reviews" are extremely shameless in their praise of the product. you can also find tests that claim to be objective but they also are manufactured to make Zetaclear look good. The internet image of Zetaclear is carefully designed to make it seem like it gets everything from ecstatic tales of success from customers to sound and sensible positive feedback from serious sources. Look around, browse around, it is ridiculous, the energy and time the people behind zetaclear has put in to create all these websites.


AND it is a homeopathic remedy. As most people know by now, homeopathic treatments are water with no active substance in it, and it 100 % unsuccessful in treating anything apart from its placebo-effect. If you think it will cure your muscle tensions, you may relax, and praise the treatment. But it is still just water, and you are fooled. They are always diluted to the point that you would need to drink the atlantic ocean full of the liquid to get even one molecule of the claimed ingredients in your mouth.

It does actually contain something though, 10 % Undecylenic Acid, which is an older substance and not as effective as newer stuff like griseofulvin and terbinafine, but at least it is there, and can be effective. http://faculty.swosu.edu/scott.long/phcl/antifung.htm


Not much more to say about it, Zetaclear is the most obvious scam of them all. On http://lee.org/blog/2009/05/02/zetaclear/ there is a discussion between people who are frustrated by this shameless and elaborate scam, drop by and comment. The company behind zetaclear are making a profit off people's desperate wishes to get well.

Pics

These pics happen to be 3 weeks old but nothing has changed since. On the pointer finger there is some persistent fungus to one side but it does not seem to grow so I leave it for now. I keep treating all fingers every day, the treatment is simple and only takes seconds so it is not any more hassle than it is brushing one's teeth in the evening.



Although I would like to eradicate the last tiny parts of fungus also I am extremely pleased and relieved with now having normal nails. It became a spare-time obsession/hobby to find a procedure that worked for me and be able to have clear nails again, and now I have the same nails I had 5 years ago. Success!

Nail fungus sufferers get various degrees of infection and it shows itself in different ways. Sometimes it does, as in my case, get ugly and nails are not only discolored and thickened but very deformed and loosened from the nail bed. When they are like this and stay like this for years you may get the idea that the nail has "forgotten" how to grow normally and will forever grow abnormally. This is not the case. The nail grows in a genetically coded manner just like skin and hair, and fungus only disturbs its pattern, it does not destroy it. Remember this when you treat your nails because it helps your motivation: they can be completely normal again.

As far as treatments go: the query "nail fungus treatment" gives 623 000 hits on google as I type this. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide probably have onychomycosis, it is a condition that is not harmful (it really isn't) so it is not at the top of the medical community's agenda, but it is a cosmetical problem for very, very many people. AND the available drugs are not yet perfect, oral Lamisil only cures about 50 % of the clients, so the market for so called "alternative" remedies is enormous. Very lucrative.

Very lucrative indeed.

And where there is money there will always be crooks. I mentioned this in an earlier post:
I estimate at least 90 % of those to be either useless or flat-out cons. It is sooo easy to mix up some stuff and call it a "nail fungus remedy" and mix in some reassuring words like "all natural", "proven to work" (implying it has been scientifically tested and verified which it never has, and if it was, it was proven to be completely ineffective), "thousands of satisfied customers" (show me the evidence), "guaranteed to cure nail fungus" (if it IS guaranteed, then YOU, as manufacturer are guaranteed to make a huge fortune, so why do you mess about on an obscure website?), "contains essential oils" etc etc etc....

For example, oil of oregano is a popular ingredient in many such remedies, on the basis that it is an all-round cure for pretty much everything and have been used by everybody since forever. Still, there is not ONE scientific study that shows that it has any antifungal properties apart from that when you keep it concentrated in a test tube and you toss fungal spores in there, yeah, the spores die. On the skin or nails it has shown no efficacy at all in studies.


Know this: conventional medicine has the best chance to help you, because it has by far the best track record. Even if a conventional drug only gives you 50 %, the alternative drug will give you a much lower chance of success. Remember:

If the alternative remedy was tremendously effective, it would be an instant hit and it would be all over the world in months. If you have an astonishing product you will not NEED to advertise on obscure websites.




Moral of the story is: IF you choose to use alternative treatments, consider using them in conjunction with treatments that are actually proven to actually be effective.

Just dropping by

I have been lazy for some strange reason, I should be really active now that I have something to show off, but sometimes it happens that way.

I still pursue the treatment, Amorolfine nail laquer on left foot, lamisil on right foot, and lamisil on fingernails. Although my ambition is twice-a-day application it turns out to be once a day normally.
This is actually something you should keep in mind when analyzing your results from treatments: be honest to yourselves. If you did not use the remedy as recommended or as often as recommended, then you cannot comment on the efficacy of this remedy. You could, but it would be irrelevant. You can only give an educated opinion on the results of the drug after NOT being used in the recommended way. If you were told to apply NalioClean twice a day for 6 months and you only did it for 3 months, then you can say "it works!" if it unexpectedly did work after that short time, but you cannot say that "it didn't work", because you did not follow the guidelines.

I will not post any pictures tonight either, but within one week they should be online. Verbal description: Not 100 % clear, but extremely close. Two of my fingers have tiny lines that show fungus 1-2 mm behind the nail edge now. I cant bring myself to wear the nails down more, I will see what happens. If the fungus grows, I will get aggressive again, but for now it seems to occupy a small area and maybe it will go away with continuous treatment and no further nail debridement.

Gotta go now, back soon!