This week on our blog, we are focusing on corns on the feet. The reason for this is because we have a lot of patients coming to us with corns and we thought it was time to write a couple of detailed blog posts about the condition. This first blog post is going to focus on what a corn is, the causes and the symptoms of corns. It is designed to give you an understanding of corns and what you can expect if you have them on your feet. Friday’s article is going to go into details of diagnosis and the treatment of corns. Please make sure that you come back on Friday for a full in-depth look at corns and how they can affect your feet. For now, though, let’s start off by finding out what a corn actually is.
What is a corn?
Corns are an area of thick dead skin, generally. They typically appear on the sides of your feet or the top of your foot. There is also a type of corn that can appear between your toes. This type of corn tends to be softer and has a thinner surface. There is also another type of corn which is known as seed corns. Seed Corns usually appear on the sole of your foot and some doctors think they are the result of blocked sweat ducts. This article is primarily about the first corn mentioned above as these are slightly more common than the other two, but there is some information about the symptoms of the less common corns below too.
The causes of corns
Although an irregular walking motion can cause some corns, most are caused by wearing poorly fitting shoes. What happens is, as you walk and your shoes rub on a certain area of your foot, this hardens the skin and this is a corn. Some of the worst offenders in the shoe department are high-heeled shoes and as a result, women are four times more likely to develop corns than men. Other causes of corns can be wearing footwear without socks and foot deformities.
The symptoms of corns
- Hard corns – a patch of hard skin on the top or side of your foot which can make it uncomfortable to walk due to the rubbing motion of your shoes that created the corn in the first place.
- A soft corn – tenderness, redness and pain between the toes.
- A seed corn – circle in shape and found on the bottom of your foot, these are often fairly painful, they are typically more painful when on the ball or heel of your foot.
As we said at the beginning of this article, this is a two-parter. Make sure that you come back on Friday to find out even more about corns and how they are diagnosed and treated. Also, if you have any other foot conditions, then you can find out more about those on our blog too. We have an abundance of posts on our blog, all related to common foot conditions with plenty of information about them all. Alternatively, you can book an appointment with us where we can have a look at your foot condition, find out the cause and get you the treatment you need.