How can I get rid of toe nail fungus naturally?

If you get a nail fungus, it is just tough to get rid of.  Medication really doesn’t penetrate the toenail and a lot of times you end up spreading it to your other toes.  When you cut your toenails, either cut the one with the fungus last or really wash the clippers in alcohol between cutting the toenails to clean off any fungus.  See, if you cut a toenail with fungus on it, the fungus can get stuck on the clippers.  Then when you go to cut another toenail, bingo, you get the fungus on another toe.  So don’t do that, that’s rule #1.  Oh, and you don’t want to clean the dirt out from under the nails because there is a good possibility of cross contamination, just like with the clippers.  If you do that, clean whatever you are using, clean it with alcohol.

Fungus looks like a discoloring or a thickening of the nail.  There normally isn’t any pain involved but it just looks ugly.  If it gets too bad, the nail could fall off because the fungus sort of detaches it from the nail bed.

Going to the podiatrist, the doctor may try to cut the nail short enough to get rid of the fungus, just kind of dig it out.  There are a few commercially available antifungals that can be prescribed but, really, they just don’t work all that well.  I’ve made some compounds with iodine, terbinafine, which is an antifungal tablet, some doctors like DMSO.  Honestly, I haven’t seen any prescription product work really well, or any over the counter antifungals either.

OK, here’s the deal.  I’ve recommended this a couple times since reading about it on the internet.  My customers, the ones who followed it, say that it works.  So what you need to do is go to the store, the grocery store, and buy a couple bags of Epsom salts, toenail clippers, and a nail file.  Cut the infected nail as short as possible and then file it down, on the top of the nail, making it thin over the fungus.  Make sure you don’t go too deep when you file, if you do, it hurts.

A minimum of once a day, two is better, and three is even better, soak your toes in hot water with a good amount of Epsom salts, maybe ½ cup or something in a shallow pan.  The water needs to be as hot as you can tolerate.  Soak them for at least 20 minutes, 30 is better.  So, try for three times a day for 30 minutes in hot water.  To make it even better, just pour that Epsom salt right on the toenail.  Get as much touching that infected toe as possible, bury it if you have to.

If you sit at a desk all day or do something where you can just soak your feet all day, that’s fine.  Keep them in the water as often as possible and just keep heating the water in the microwave or adding hot water.  Try putting a towel under one end of the pan so that the water is deeper towards the toes and your heal is out of the water.  It’s not necessary to do this but soaking the heal of your foot for a long time will have the tendency to soften the skin of your heal and that could cause pain when you walk, you want your heal to be tough.

When doing this treatment, you want to keep your feet out of shoes and socks as much as possible.  The fungus grows in a warm, moist environment so avoid that situation.  Wear sandals as much as you can and keep your toes dry between treatments.  Try to keep your feet out of shoes, put them on at the last minute before work, take them off at lunch, take them off while driving, things like that until the fungus if gone.

After you are done soaking, you don’t have to throw away the water with the Epsom salts in it.  You can use the same water for a few days, maybe even a week.  Just add some water as it evaporates.

You also want to file that nail down just about every day.  You want there to be as little room or as thin a nail possible between the water and the fungus.  That just makes it easier for the Epsom salts to do their work.  So file, cut, file, cut, keep it short and thin.

I’m not going to tell you that this is going to take care of the fungus overnight, or even in a week.  This is a tough one, this nail fungus.  I mean, it can take over a month for this to work.  Another thing that you may want to try is putting Vicks Vapor rub on your toes in the morning after your soak and before bed.  Some people say that the Vicks prevents the fungus from growing but I don’t really have any proof either way on that one.