Good morning my toes! It is Jonathan, a.k.a. The Toe Bro, and I'm still going with the videos. I actually came
to the office a little early today but I still have some time before the first patient and I thought for today's video
I'm gonna do something that I've always wanted to do just go into my local
pharmacy where you know a chain pharmacy that has everything
there and I want to go through the foot section. Every time I go to let's just
say I'll use Walmart for example,
huge foot
section. All these different tools and I'm always curious what people are buying. Do they know how to use it? Would do they know actually
what happens when they use this? Is it safe to use? dDes it actually work? So I'm gonna jump
over to the pharmacy. We're gonna go through the foot section and see what's there and I'm gonna give you a little bit of info
about what's good, what's bad, what you should do, what you shouldn't, and
and just give you a quick little review of everyday
over-the-counter foot products that you guys do have access to and just give you a little bit of guidance.
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So here we are in the mecca of foot care products. We got this whole row here.
Looks like more insoles and actual products over here.
Okay. There is, it's overwhelming to see how many things are here.
So since we've been talking about
corns and calluses, let's pull out what we can buy here to treat our corns and calluses. So number one we have this nice
electric rotary
foot file. This is nice because it is electric, so not as much stress on a hand and it has a nice grit.
So this is something that you definitely can use on the feet to kind of file down or smooth out the hard skin.
The problem with it as
you can see it's a wide piece so it doesn't really concentrate on one
certain area. It can take just the circle that might be having hard skin and the normal skin around that so it can be a
little bit dangerous. We have refills there but again for general
hard skin, let's say on the heel, the ball of the foot that's wide
you
can definitely use something like this. They have one that's for wet and dry and as you can see, the grit is very different.
Anything that's more like sandpaper
has to be used when the skin is dry.
Look at that! That's pretty cool! They have one for the nails as well kind of like what I have.
But mine's a little bit more hardcore. We have this one here. We'll put this here.
The next thing we have is a rasp callus file.
So issue with this one, this one has little holes that pull skin.
So again this this can be really
effective but can be quite dangerous because it can pull
normal hard skin as well.
Because the paddle is so big, it takes up a lot of room. It doesn't just treat in one small area on the foot.
It's really hard to be precisely
treating one piece of hard skin. So that's why the larger the piece,
the more area you can pull. That's why a lot of comments yesterday we're saying you use such a small scalpel
but it gives me a lot more control and precision.
We have a pumice stone. So this thing has little holes so it's able to pull the dead skin.
Both of these, this one and this one, can be used when the skin is wet but if something's really dry or
what's better to use when the skin is dry is something that has more sandpaper. So again, here's some basic tools here.
The last one that I see here is the actual
blade for corn and callus remover. The problem with the blade it's very sharp and obviously very
dangerous and if you don't have the right precision or control, you can cut normal skin really easily.
These three can be quite dangerous because it's very easy to pull more skin than
you want while this one because it doesn't have any teeth or holes it just
smooths it down really thin. So again, you can still take too much skin but it's a lot harder with this.
To me, having a foot file much safer. Again here,
another kind of file.
Again safety ones, something that's more of a sandpaper or file is better.
This teeth or grit anything has holes the blade can pull more skin but again it's much more dangerous.
So these are kind of some options; it all really depends on how much
flexibility you have, if you can reach your feet or you've helped someone who has a little bit more control or
better vision can use these tools safely.
But again, all these or what mostly people get. I always suggest going safe and just doing it more often.
But if you do have the control then you can use something a little bit more aggressive.
As you can see all those tools were for calluses even though they say corns and calluses but as we know, corn
go into the body. So we need something to scoop it out and there's nothing really here that can really scoop out
corns and that's why they're so tricky. What we do have is
corn remover. We have this one here. We have Dr.
Scholl's different style that's all like band-aids and all the corn that really is it's just
salicylic acid
concentrated in a medicated pad to soften the pores. The corn pads, they just have salicylic acid to soften the skin
and eats away the skin turning it white and makes it easier to pull out. The problem with corn pads
sometimes if they're left on for too long or someone has thin skin or
circulatory problems, that can actually burn and it eats too much of the skin and create an actual wound. So again, you can use these but
they're only just softening the skin; you still need something to actually remove the hard skin from the area.
So this section here, which we're going to talk about later on,
all about warts.
So I'm definitely doing a video on warts and when I get to that part I'll come back to this and
go through all this treatment. So the ingredients of all of these warts treatments is the exact same as a corn it's just
salicylic acid. It's trying to damage the skin, soften the skin, damage it, so then the skin can be removed.
17% salicylic acid. So again corns and warts are treated basically of the much pretty much treated the same over-the-counter.
You just soften the skin, remove as much as you can, hopefully destroy or remove the corn that's there or the wart.
So that's all there really is here for corns is using this acid pad
but you need to have someone dig out the corn. That's why seeing a foot specialist is quite important.
So we also have some some callus removers and it's all salicylic acid.
These callous cushioning pads, they're very, very thin so yes they give you some padding but they really
don't take too much pressure off. The goal
with corns and calluses, as you guys learn, is to remove the pressure. So the goal of these pads with a circle is to
offload the issue. If we just cushion the area overall and here sometimes we have some moleskin padding but to me gel
gel material is the best.
So here we have pads for the ball of the foot,
the heel, in the back of the shoe.
We have pads to cushion the toe and
all these are doing is trying, to remove the pressure. If we can remove the pressure, we're going
to remove the hard skin that builds up. We have the gel inserts.
They're thinner, some are a little bit thicker,
some are for women's dress shoes. The whole
goal is to have more padding in your shoe
to reduce the pressure. That's what's really gonna slow down the amount of hard skin build up. So again, for corns and calluses,
we really have
scrapers. Scrapers, files, pumice stones,
emery boards,
electric files, and they're just trying to remove as much of the dead skin as you can. The biggest problem with treating corns and calluses
yourself, it's safely removing as much hard skin as possible.
That's why
sandpaper is the safest because you can just file out and there's nothing cutting into your skin. If for you are using something has
teeth or a blade, you have to be very, very careful.
Calluses you just shave down and
cushion the area.
Corns you have to shave the callus on top
but digging them out is very, very hard and that's where seeing a foot specialist is really important. The last
important thing to discuss is cream. Here we have different types of cream.
Okay.
What cream really does it softens the skin giving it more elasticity.
The more elastic the skin is, the more it can stretch and it doesn't crack or split on pressure.
So what we're looking for is cream versus lotion. Cream has more oil
component of it and that allows for better retention of moisture versus lotion which is more watery.
So to me, any sort of cream is going to help.
Here's one and this one has
urea.
Let's see this one.
urea
What urea does it allows skin to absorb more water
making it softer. That way the softened skin is easier to remove.
It's not as painful because it's softer and that's basically all urea does. So if you have extremely dry skin
look for something that says
urea.
Here's another one urea 25%.
So the more urea you have, the softer it's gonna allow your skin's gonna have more potential to to break up and soften
hardened callus. Then you can use a file or a rasp
or whatever you have at home that you can safely use to pull away the dead skin.
So that's basically all we have for corns and calluses. In a pharmacy, we have files, we have
rasps, we have blades to remove as much of the bulk of the dead skin as
we can, we have corn pads to soften the corn so it's not as painful but nothing really to dig them out.
Then at last we have cream the has some has urea to soften the skin make it more flexible
so it doesn't split or build up and become very hard and painful and the last thing is we have
gel pads something to cushion the ball of the foot, the gel insole to cushion the heel,
or the whole foot in general and we have also little spacers,
gel spacers, for the tops of the toes, at the side of the toes that always bang up against the side of the shoes.
The last thing that's not here is footwear. If you change your footwear that's wider,
softer,
deeper, that's gonna give us again reduction of pressure and less hard skin. So that's basically how you guys can treat corns and calluses
yourself
in a pharmacy.