Why does a lister’s corn hurt when I run? Well, that’s what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I recently did an episode where I was talking about the lister’s corn and this is a thing where it looks like the nail, the pinky toe, the little toenail actually has a split in it and that edge of the nail that looks like this little separate nail, it’s not a nail at all, it’s callus. It’s a thick skin. It’s gotten hard from all the irritation of rubbing up against the nail plate next to it because the little toes are often tilted a little bit and they get rubbed right on the edge of the nail.
You form a callus, you form a corn, it gets stick and hard and it looks like a nail. That in itself is not a problem but sometimes it actually does cause pain in your little toe when you’re running. And I just saw somebody who had this problem where it was really painful, he actually was suspicious that the nail might be ingrown because it hurts so much.
If you think about this, if you think about your toe basically, where you have the nail sitting up here, this is your toe. There’s a nerve at each of the four corners and if you get enough pressure where you have really thick callus that’s getting pushed inward and the shoes pushing on it, it pushes right against the nerve and it can cause a lot of pain.
In this particular guy’s situation, what he had was he had one of these corns but what had happened is that when I trimmed it down there was actually a hard spot. This happens sometimes is that if this is your skin and you start forming callus, let’s say there’s a the bone underneath, the condyle of the bone causes an excess pressure point and that’s a little spot of irritation.
So, what happens? Well, your body makes more callus and then what happens is eventually you can get really thick callus over it and the pressure from the shoe and the ground pushes it inward. So, you wind up with this hard spot that basically looks like that getting pressed inward.
When I saw him and started trimming down this area of callus on top and then saw this tiny little spot or really hard callus in there. Then I knew that I had to cut that out and when I cut it out, well it actually left a depression in the skin at the edge of the nail where I trimmed all that callus out.
In that case then we put some ointment in it to soften the skin so the skin would flatten back out. But it was really that he had this super hard spot underneath this whole big flat lister’s corn that looked like a piece of nail and when it was pushing that whole piece that was flat that looked like a separate nail while he was pushing this hard lump of callus into the skin and causing a tremendous amount of pain.
After carefully trimming that out and removing it, he had no more pain. But that can actually start as one tiny little spot of irritation, usually where the bone is underneath. And then it causes a whole lot of pain when that callus forms becomes hard and gets pressed in her harder. It’s kind of like having a little bitty rock taped to your toe and obviously that would hurt.
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