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!

On with the show

Still going with the procedure, my ring finger is now 100 % and looks like it was never infected. When the infection is so bad that the nail is not attached to the nail bed it tends to become elevated and rise from the nail bed. I thought maybe it would stay mis-shaped even after being cured but it is really completely symmetrical. So bear that in mind, the naisl do remember how to grow normally!

On the other 3 fingers I noticed the fungus was getting hold once more at the tips, so I filed that away. It kinda sucks when you are so close to the end but there is no way but the hard way, take away the bad, or it will keep infecting the good. What is a few more weeks when you have had the problem for years? And although the lamisil gel (NOT the cream) is expensive it really last for a long time, 14 nails I have been able to treat for over a month with 1 tube which is about 25 USD.

My toenails I filed down completely once more as the treatment was not as successful there. I could not bring myself to take them away completely. It is damn hard work to file down all the way to the nail bed since you want to be careful not to hurt yourself, and it is a time-consuming procedure as it is. But they are thin, thin now, and I treat my right foot twice a day now with the Lamisil. On my loeft foot I use Amorolfine nail laquer, mostly because I still have half a bottle left and I should use it up since it cost a fortune. When it is all out I will evaluate which foot has had the most progress.


In my next post I will post before- and afterpictures of the filing process and some pointers on how to go about it.

My procedure

So this is what finally got me progress, after using it in a creative and not doctor-recommended way. It is late and I will only make a quick update here by pasting some of what I have written in the awesome information source that is Lee's blog at http://lee.org/blog/2009/05/14/nonyx-nail-gel-part-2/comment-page-1/#comment-291999 . Forgive me if this post seems like a cut and paste job....

For years the look of my horrible nails have made me feel bad about myself. A couple of months ago I did something radical: I took my microdrill, put a sand tip on it (for marking tools and stuff) and slowly but surely, for hours and hours, wore all my toenails down to nothing, and also my thumbnail. This nail was horrific at the time as it had rapidly gotten worse and was more or less loose all the way back to the base. With drills, knives and the motor drill with different tips I methodically wore it down till I was on bare skin. A few times it hurt and there was some minor bloodshed when I got overexcited but it is really possible if you take the time!

On the bare nail bed I have since then applied 2-3 times a day Lamisil single dose, the FOOT fungus solution that contains terbinafine and is supposed to only be used once and not to be repeated. =) My toenails I cannot judge yet (though the nail bed looks nice) but my thumb IS ALMOST COMPLETELY GROWN OUT ALL HEALTHY. After all these years!

I firmly believe the lamisil is responsible for the improvement I see. I have not used itraconazole for over a month (although I must say the itraconazole seemed to have some independent success with the other nails as I tried this out only on the thumb to start with. As my success with the thumbnail was instantaneous and obvious I went on with the other nails in the same way) but the nails keep getting better. The stuff works like a charm now that I expose the nail bed to it.

The stuff is expensive by weight, but it lasts for a long time…. I have now used less than 1,5 tubes in the last 2 months, and I applied it on 10 toenails pretty much every day and on 4 fingernails 2 times every day. The tubes are about 25 USD a piece, and 4 grams. You could make a tube last 2 months which by this price would cost you maybe 13 bucks a month, surely you can spend that?

After a while the layer can turn a shiny greyish colour, especially on small depressions in the nail, but that is no problem, it only shows that you have a nice and thick layer of the stuff working constantly.

From time to time, maybe every 2 weeks I scrape the rubbery grey stuff off and clean the nail, this only takes seconds, then I just stick with the process.

There you go. =)

New pictures