A corn is a hardened skin formation that can occur on the ball of your foot. It can literally make you miserable because your feet serve as a mode of transportation? How do you know whether or not it’s a corn or a Plantar’s Wart, though? Well, you can know, and you must know before you treat your foot pain. Here’s how to tell if you have a corn and how to treat your corn once you decide you do have a corn on the ball of your foot:
Symptoms
Sense of a rock in your shoe. If you have a corn, you’ll feel like you have a rock in your shoe. You may even take your shoe off and shake it out, but find nothing. Still, standing on your foot causes whatever it is in your foot to press deep into your foot. This is likely a corn, and the deeper it gets, the more painful it will become, so don’t ignore it.
Clean skin overgrowth. When you look on the ball of your foot, you’ll likely see some thick, yellowish tissue overgrowth that covers the area where the pain exists. This callus helps seal in the corn and walking on your foot causes the corn to burrow deeper into your foot.
Present in only one spot. A corn will most likely be located in only one spot of the ball of your foot, unless you have more than one corn. However, a corn does not spread like a Plantar’s Wart does. So, if you see that the trouble is spreading on the bottom of your foot, you’re likely dealing with a Plantar’s Wart.
Absence of black dots. Make sure that no black dots exist where the callus is. If so, you likely have a Plantar’s Wart, and this foot ailment needs to be treated differently, so don’t try this home remedy for a Plantar’s Wart. Use this home remedy only for a corn on the ball of your foot.
You can try over-the-counter remedies for corns, and they may help alleviate the pain. They may even help you rid the ball of your foot of the painful corn, but chances are that this will take some time. So, save yourself some time and pain by treating the corn on the ball of your foot with this home remedy:
Wear a corn pad. Don’t dig at your foot with a pair of scissors or try to cut off the corn as if tends to grow out of your foot. Growing outward is a good thing because this allows you to easily remove the corn, at least the first removal, which is crucial because it helps eliminate much of the pain.
Take a hot bath and remove the corn pad. After you’ve given the corn some time to grow out of your foot, you should see some protruding skin. While your skin is still moist from your bath, take a pair of thin-tipped scissors (barber scissors or cuticle scissors), open them up, and use the tip of one blade to pop the corn out of your foot.
Make sure that you put the scissor tip at the top of the corn kernel, not at the side. Push down, to the side, and out. This should quickly pop the kernel out of your foot, and you’ll have a cone of skin in your hand. Yes, the corn kernel grows in a cone fashion and widens at the top as it grows deeper into the ball of your foot.
Pop the corn out of your foot. Now, your major pain should be over. Your foot won’t bleed because you just extracted a big kernel of tissue, nothing else. Your foot is not completely cured of the kernel, though. If you take your finger and press the hole in your foot toward your foot bone, you’ll still feel the sense of a rock.
This means that you have another corn kernel growing in your foot. So, go ahead and put another corn pad over the hole in your foot and wear one faithfully until the new corn has grown outward. This corn will likely not get as big, and you will likely have to clip it out of your foot with the same type of scissors.
To do this, it’s best to use a small pair of cuticle scissors because you can be precise with cutting and have control over what you’re cutting. So, once again, take a hot bath and then clip the dead portion of skin off the top of (and maybe some out of) your foot. Do not cut into the skin that you can feel yourself cutting into. Cut only the dead skin.
Replace the corn pad and repeat as necessary. Eventually, you will rid yourself of the painful corn that exists on the ball of your foot.
Resource
Foot-care.org
