You might wonder what is meant by overgrown toe skin because all you know about is ingrown toenails. Well, this is a condition where you have too much skin that surrounds your toenail, and in fact, your toenail is perfect.
Certain things can cause the skin that’s around your toenail to pile up and get infected. If you talk about an ingrown toenail, it means that you have a noticeable abnormality of the toenail, where it will curl visibly on one or both sides of the toe.
The causes of an overgrown toe skin
The main cause of overgrown toe skin is through activities of weight-bearing. These are like walking, standing for long hours, or anything else where you put a lot of weight on your feet. This can also be caused by the wrong footwear if your toes are under constant pressure inside your shoes that are too tight or too high.
When you have excessive soft skin/tissue on the sides of your toenail, walking will cause the tissue/skin to bulge out on the sides. Your toenail can dig into the tissues causing damage to it. Your toe skin will develop infection, redness, swelling and it can be very painful.
Can you prevent overgrown toe skin?
If you have excess tissue/skin on the sides of your toenail, you will be at a much higher risk to develop overgrown toe skin. Don’t cut your toenails too short, specifically on the sides of the nail as it will cause your excessive skin/tissue to bulge out even more through weight-bearing.
Keeping it short, but not too short on the sides, can reduce the probability of you developing the condition of overgrown toe skin. It can also alleviate the pain to some degree that is associated with this condition, although it won’t cure it.
The Vandenbos procedure
Sometimes, if a patient thinks he/she suffers from an ingrown toenail, it might not be the toenail but the tissue/skin that surrounds the nail. Procedures to target your toenail will most of the time result in you going again for extra surgery. These may lead to the mutilation of your toes, because of the fact that your nail will partially be removed and it can be unnecessary.
If you need to remove overgrown toe skin, then the Vandenbos procedure is what you require.
It’s a minor surgical procedure that can be done easily in your doctor’s office. The best foot doctor will freeze your toe while he/she performs the surgery, and you will not experience any pain. He/she can now remove your overgrown toe skin, without removing or cutting your toenail, because the problem is not with the nail. It might take about twenty minutes to do one toe, and around thirty minutes if they have to do two.
Why is Vandenbos surgery better than other treatments?
With this surgery your toenail won’t be touched, unlike other procedures performed to treat your ingrown toenail. It means your toenail will keep its normal look after you had the surgery, which is an exceptional cosmetic result.
Due to other procedures, your toenail can be deformed and there is no guarantee that you will be rid of the problem as it frequently returns. Any surgery to remove a part of your entire toenail when you only have overgrown toe skin may lead to a risk of getting an infection, and you may require antibiotics. Most of the time it won’t fix your problem.
It can also result in a reduced cosmetic look. Vandenbos surgery is safe and successful, with a perfect cosmetic appearance and no re-occurrence. Once it’s correctly performed with the removal of sufficient soft tissues/skin, your problem will be something of the past.
