fredag 19 augusti 2011

Just dropping by: Scholl fungal nail treatment

One poster commented on my last post and said he/she would now try a treatment sold by Scholl (www.scholl.com). I don't have too much to say about it but here is just my immediate view of it:

Firstly, the big flashy ad that claims the product will kill 99,9 % of all nail fungus is of course suspicious and in all probability a piece of sensationalist advertising exaggerating or manufacturing completely the abilities of the product.

A complete list of ingredients cannot be found which is also a warning sign. They say the product will work by lowering the PH of the nail and make it inhospitable to fungus, sounds fair enough. The exact same thing happens when you soak your toes in household vinegar and it is a fact that fungus does not thrive in too acid environments. How effective this treatment is for actually lowering the PH far enough to kill fungus is unknown. They claim it to be scientifically verified but do not link to any studies or trials.

What the PH-adjusting agent is they do not tell on the website. The permeation-enhancing "formula" is said to be urea, panthenol and glycerin. Sounds OK, anecdotal evidence from the web point to urea being useful for dissolving the nail structure, glycerine is sometimes used in ointments and similar products and panthenol is seemingly good for penetration of the skin according to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12113650 .


All in all it seems like a decent product, it can probably do some good for some people. However, by the look of it it does not seem to bring anything new really, just another mix of substances that have been on the agenda before (sans the PH-lowering main substance that is not named. If I may take a wild guess it is probably vinegar as usual).

On the flip side the formulation is a bit more interesting than for example the huge internet scam that is zetaclear which is pretty much only vinegar and water at a hefty price, and other products. Urea is interesting and panthenol is probably not bad. I will stick with complete debridement of the nail and application of conventional prescription substance (lamisil once) but if you want to give this a go you are probably not without hope. Be sure to update others with the result either here or on other websites.

onsdag 23 februari 2011

Before and after. =)








tisdag 22 februari 2011

Zetaclear scam. And other stuff. And an interesting tale...

I don't post much these days, since my fingernails were cured it does not take up much of my spare time anymore. But I do want to stay active in the hope that more people find this blog and are treated to something not easy to come by or distinguish in the internet world of nail fungus sufferers: Facts and information posted with no hidden agenda, no bias, and no bullshit. I may keep posting sporadically but it will remain useful, so I hope that those who appreciate puts it on their watchlist, or recommends it to others.

As you understand, I am not associated with any drug manufacturer and I make zero money off of this (even if I did, the number of viewers could never make me a cent) so the only 2 reasons I write is: 1. I want others to be helped with a problem with which I am more than familiar. and 2. I am annoyed with people who does not want to help but only want to make money off of people remaining unhappy, such as the people behind the zetaclear scam. If you see any ads whatsoever they are Blogger's own ads and not mine.



When you read an internet tale about somebody who had tremendous success with a nail fungus treatment you should read it, but read it with an ounce or two of healthy, sensible scepticsism (sp?). It could be completely true. It could be completely true. The statement could be truthful, but we don't know the poster. We don't know his or hers life, we have not seen their nails, before or after. If they post pics, we don't know if it is their nails.


So should we just disregard everything we read? Absolutely not. But we should make asensible decision based on what we know, and if it something that should be checked out, give google a minute and check it out.

Could there be bias? Most of us have probably sometime taken a remedy, or a drug, or knocked on wood, or done something that we really wanted to work, and made ourselves believe it did. Only in some time did we realise it didn't, and we were only fooling ourselves. If you don't know the basic principles about the placebo effect I strongly recommend you to search and find out about it. When people really, really want to be helped they tend to convince themselves that they really are being helped, and only in retrospect do they find out that they only wanted to believe, but their nails or whatever still looked the same. A nail could be 100 % infected but start to lose a bit of the yellow, and you would think it is getting better, a small change becomes a big change in your mind when it may in fact be just the normal things that go on in a nail ravaged by fungus.



Could the poster be a scammer? It only takes minutes to write a post. Could there be a manufacturer of a drug posting as a pretend nail fungus sufferer? Or a person who sells said drug pretending to be a "patient", writing a fake review? Maybe even a spambot, automatically writing a nonsensical post? We don't know. But it is good to think about the possibilities, and know that we don't know......

You are unlikely to find deliberately falsified success stories about conventional treatments manufactured by large established companies, simply because they probably would not go through the hassle. Their drugs have passed all the scientific trials, went on market, are sold in state pharmacies (where I live) and their companies make profits in millions and millions of dollars. If even a thousand people buy their drug because of a fake post it is not enough to make an impact on their overall profit. They simply will not bother. If they wanted to go on forums and blogs marketing their drugs they could do it more easily and effectively and point to all the scientific trials that showed their drug had positive results, if it hadn't, they would be unable to market it. If it hadn't, their reputation would suffer, and money would be lost in the millions.

What about smaller maufacturers that make drugs that are outside of the established medicine(which is just an elaborate way of saying "NOT proven to work at all")? They have enormous reasons to create scams, their sales could increase tenfold if marketed correctly.

These companies may often, or seldom use these methods. But it is important to know that when reading a post, and you don't know the person writing it, the poster may have had something to gain from people believing it.

If he had nothing to gain, he is unlikely to have gone through the hassle of writing a false post.

If he had something to gain, maybe he did write a false post.


The reason I pick out Zetaclear in the jungle of nonsense mumbo-jumbo nail fungus remedies is, as said before, because they make a ridiculously huge effort to put these false claims on the web. Nonyx is another one that only contains water and vinegar under fancy names, but the Zetaclear scam simply takes the price.

This post is long now and must be posted, see you later for the mentioned tale.... =)

onsdag 13 oktober 2010

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.



fredag 8 oktober 2010

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.

fredag 1 oktober 2010

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!