Don’t Perform “Bathroom Surgery”: When You Shouldn't Treat an Ingrown Toenail at Home

For something so small, an ingrown toenail can have an outsized effect on your life, mainly because of the pain. Putting on shoes is practically impossible, and sleep is hard to come by as your toe throbs all night — even the pressure of the sheet is too much.

If you’re thinking about taking matters into your own hands and performing a little bathroom surgery for your ingrown toenail, you may want to think again and instead seek our help.

To explain why, our extensive team of foot health experts at Neuhaus Foot and Ankle pulled together a few conditions in which a do-it-yourself approach to ingrown toenails is not wise. Let’s take a look.

When infection is a greater risk for your feet

Our first caution against bathroom surgery for ingrown toenails extends to anyone who has circulatory or nerve issues in their lower limbs. 

For example, about half of the more than 38 million Americans with diabetes will develop peripheral neuropathy (nerve damage) in their lower legs and feet. The combination of nerve damage and circulation issues that often accompany diabetes can lead to slow-healing wounds in the lower limbs that are more prone to infection. In turn, these infections can set the stage for more serious problems like gangrene.

This same applies to anyone with peripheral artery disease (PAD), which affects about 12 million Americans. With the compromised circulation that comes with PAD, wounds in your feet don’t heal as quickly, which leaves you open to infection.

So, if you have diabetes or PAD, please come to us for any foot problem, including something as seemingly minor as an ingrown toenail.

When infection sets in

If there’s redness and swelling around your ingrown toenail and maybe even some pus, you have likely already developed an infection. In this case, bathroom surgery is ill-advised.

When the  ingrown toenail is very painful

We’ve already established that ingrown toenails can be very painful. Well, performing bathroom surgery on something that is painful will likely lead to more pain.

To avoid this, you can make a quick trip to one of our offices, where we use a topical spray or local anesthetic to numb the area before we quickly remedy your ingrown toenail.

Repeat ingrown toenails

If you’ve been repeatedly trimming away the piece of nail that’s growing into your flesh, only to have it grow back and become ingrown time and again, please come see us for a longer-term solution.

Is it ever a good idea to treat ingrown toenails at home?

Treating an ingrown toenail through bathroom surgery is rarely a great idea — the name alone should give you pause. If the toenail is digging into your skin, we don’t want you to try to cut anything away, as you may make the problem worse.

We recommend at-home treatment only if it involves soaking your nail to make it softer, which can also soothe the pain as the nail grows out. We also recommend giving your toenail plenty of space during this time — so no jamming your feet into pointy-toed shoes.

However, when it comes to cutting an ingrown toenail, that job is almost always best left to a foot health specialist.

For quick and easy treatment of your ingrown toenail, we invite you to contact one of our 16 locations in Tennessee to schedule an appointment.