We made it my toes! It is Saturday, May 12. I started at 9:00 a.m
this morning with a nail surgery and ended the day with another nail surgery at 5:45 6:00.
So I'm finished! So it's been a long day but like I said, I'm here to put out videos for you guys.
I was seeing a couple comments about this and today I had actually a few comments about it as well from patients: sweaty feet
what to do when you have really sweaty feet? There's a lot of reasons why people have sweaty feet.
Sometimes it's something within the body that's happening and sometimes it's just our external environment,
meaning the socks, the material that we have on our feet and the shoes that we're using.
So here's a quick little run-through that I would give my patients, what they can try to do to reduce the sweatiness of their feet.
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The one thing to know about sweaty feet,
there are many different reasons why it happens.
The body's sweat glands are just over producing so we get excessive amount of
moisture or sweat being produced. Some people's feet
just sweat more often and there's not much you can really do to really try to control it. Other times
it's brought on by stress,
by nervousness,
external factors that put stress on our body and in response, the sweat glands start working. The goal for us is to try to reduce the
environment or do things to our feet to try to reduce the amount of sweat production.
The funny thing I notice about kids they have the sweatiest, stinkiest, grossest feet ever!
It's really normal for your kids to be having sweaty feet. They're just really hyperactive.
Their sweat glands are really working. The first tip about sweaty feet is the socks that you guys are using.
There's many different materials of socks out there. I would suggest to stick to something more like cotton; something
that's really breathable and doesn't have any sort of polyester or synthetic fibers. Cotton, Merino wool,
bamboo material socks all these things are much more natural and have less synthetic fibers.
It's the synthetic fibers that might have rubber or other material that traps moisture in. Think of synthetic fibers as
plastic and now wrapping your foot in Saran wrap. What's gonna happen?
It's just going to get so hot and trap so much moisture in. It's definitely better having something more like a towel
to wrap your foot, if you think of it like a cotton towel, to kind of absorb as much
sweat as possible.
The second tip to avoid sweaty feet is your footwear. Having
closed toed shoes that have again synthetic material or material that really traps moisture,
plastic hard plastic, is really gonna contain the amount of moisture and heat and that's gonna cause your foot to sweat a lot more.
I try to get patients to use more mesh like
material something that has more fabric base or has a vents in them just to reduce the amount of heat
that's trapped inside the shoe. For work boots and for dress shoes, it's really hard to have a breathable
shoe material just because of health and safety reasons. So those are things that you can avoid.
That's why having better, soft
material to reduce the amount of heat and absorb some of that sweat from your foot is gonna be really helpful. Right there
and then, changing the socks, changing the shoes is the best thing that you can do to try to reduce the moisture.
Sometimes I have to get people to change their routine. If you find that halfway through the day your socks are soaked, you have
to change them. Changing your socks more often to keep the feet in a very dry
environment is very important.
If you're in the construction boots all day, halfway through your shift take off your socks, dry your feet, and put on the fresh new
pair of socks; that's gonna be really helpful. In terms of footwear, if your footwear is closed and you cannot get away from having a
breathable material, have a second pair of boots or shoes something that you can give the shoe a rest. The goal is just to allow
the shoe to dry out
before you go and put your foot right back in there because sometimes we get home ,we take off our shoes,
we put them down in the closet, in a dark environment, and there's no real airflow and the moisture stays in there.
So when you put your shoe back on in the morning,
it's still just as moist. So sometimes having a second or alternating pair of shoes can be really helpful. Changing your socks throughout the day is
really important, if you tend to have really sweaty feet, right after school for young kids.
I tell the parents instead of just getting them in the car and you keep going on, take off their shoes,
take off your socks,
dry their feet, put on a fresh pair of socks. That way if there's still more after school
activities, their feet are at least given a break, they're getting a nice fresh pair of
socks that are dry and even change those shoes again
so then they have a fresh dry environment. After the gym or after swimming, instead of going into the same
socks and shoes that you just performed activity in, dry your feet, put on a fresh pair of socks, and then put on a fresh
pair of shoes.
Changing the shoes and socks after the activity, putting everything on that's fresh and dry, just to reduce the amount of
sweat or moisture in that environment for your feet.
There's a few things that I try to get people to do on their own try to
decrease the amount of sweat production. One thing I get people to do is using rubbing alcohol.
So this is just rubbing alcohol in the spray bottle.
What you would do is basically just spray in between the toes first thing in the morning or after the gym, dry your feet, spray
it a little bit of rubbing alcohol, and
alcohol is going to dry out the skin. The goal, especially for the feet, is to keep in between the toes extremely dry.
Hopefully the less sweat production we have. Another product that we have is DRYSOL. So this is an alcohol-based
product that has aluminum chloride in it
and again, its purpose is to dry out the skin and to reduce sweat gland production.
This is something you spray
nightly in between the toes, on the bottom of the foot, and you do that for two three weeks and that's supposed to help reduce
the amount of sweat production. An easy one they don't want to purchase, you know if they'll have rubbing alcohol or they don't have
access to DRYSOL is
spray deodorant.
Spraying the toes, in between the toes, the feet with a deodorant is going to help try to minimize the amount of sweat production,
reduce the amount of moisture in the environment, and that's gonna be helpful as well.
Here I have another foot foam that's actually made specifically for sweaty feet.
This one does not contain aluminum chloride. It has some natural products like oak bark extract
and all it does, it reduces the amount of sweat production. There's been some studies on this product that said after one month of use,
twice a day, they were looking at 40% amount of sweat production.
I think this is one of the most underutilized products in the foot foams that I offer.
Everyone has dry skin or cracked skin but a lot of people have moist skin.
A lot of people will think that using some sort of foot foam that moisturizes skin would be counterintuitive
in trying to reduce the amount of moisture, but because of the products that are in here,
it's actually going to reduce the amount of sweat production without
drying out the foot because we still want the foot to be moisturized,
we just don't want to have so much sweat production. Sweaty feet also comes with smelly feet. The bacteria that's on your skin
that lives in our shoes, the fungus that we pick up that's in our shoes, whether you like it or not is
in that environment. All these things cause a odor.
So sterilizing your shoes or trying to clean your shoe as much as possible is really helpful. At the end of the day, take the original
insole out of your shoe, if you're able to let it dry out.
You can go the extra mile spray it with some Lysol spray or some sort of disinfectant spray
to try to kill any sort of fungus or bacteria.
Here I have two: I have a shoe deodorant and a foot deodorant.
This one does have some tea tree oil in it, which has been known to kill fungus.
It's supposed to reduce
the smell of your shoes and help reduce some of the fungus that may be living in your shoes and again, good old foot deodorant
it's just again to reduced amount of smell that happens with sweaty feet. Drying the feet anytime
the feet get wet is really important.
We do not want to put a moist foot into socks or into shoes that then gets trapped that moisture has nowhere to go
the foot gets hot
then we get more sweat production. After a shower, take the time to dry in between the toes,
use
rubbing alcohol, and spray bottle; spray in between the toes. Use any sort of foot cream or foot products that help reduce sweat like the
one I showed you. If you have really hyperactive sweat glands,
if you've tried all these little tips, you've tried changing the shoes often, the socks, you're drying the feet,
you're using products that still aren't working,
there are other solutions that you do have to speak to your family doctor about. One way to actually treat
hyperactive sweat glands is by doing some sort of Botox injections.
Botox will basically
paralyze the nerve and that's gonna reduce the amount of signals sent to the sweat glands. If we can reduce the amount of
activity to the sweat glands by this Botox injection, you're gonna get overall less sweaty feet.
I always start first with changing the socks more often, changing the shoes more often, drying the feet before and after activity,
using some sort of products
whether it's an alcohol, rubbing alcohol, the DRYSOL with aluminum chloride products, or using something like the foot foam that's made for sweaty feet.
Using those products with the changes of the footwear and pretty much the routine ,that
routine is gonna get you your best bet every reducing the amount of sweat. If you find that that's not helping, that's the sign
maybe go to your family doctor or get a referral to your dermatologist
to determine what other options you have. So a nice quick easy video
but a big common topic of just having sweaty feet. Try those tips. You guys
change the socks, change things more often, spend a little bit more time looking after your feet, and that's gonna really make a big difference.
Toe Bro, out.