Toenail fungus pictures (progress with Pythium oligandrum)

[SarahVaughter]

This is how progress should look, when using our Pythium oligandrum treatment against nail fungus. Nail fungus is the hardest of all dermatophyte Tinea fungal infections to cure - skin infections such as jock itch and athlete's foot disappear much faster. These pictures are from a customer of ours, published here with permission.

Picture at start of treatment:



Picture halfway treatment. The worst fungus-infested parts of the nail have crumbled off:



Picture at end of first treatment round. The shade of brown (the nail fungus) is getting lighter and lighter.
New, healthy nail will slowly replace the damaged nail:



Because the treatment was used on all the nails on two feet, one more treatment is required to cure them. We will keep updating this posting as treatment progresses.

Here is the currently most recent picture of that toe at the start of the second treatment round:
The left part of the bail looks dark but that's the shadow of the adjacent toe. More nail has regrown so the forward edge of the nail looks a bit better.



Update: The patient said that somewhere along the course of this treatment, he skipped a bath, so for an entire month there was no treatment at all, which would allow the fungus to revert about two weeks back. So 6 weeks of treatment has been lost. But we're not tracking the time here, only the progress. The patient will make new pictures soon.

New picture made:



The nail looks much more damaged than on the first picture, but the state of the infection is actually much better, in spite of the missed round of treatment.
In the first photo, the left side of the nail has a small fungal patch, stretching along the edge, onto the nail bed. On the second photo, that patch became lighter and the nail itself looks worse, more damaged.
That's only because the fungus that was holding the nail together with its own biomass has nearly fully been killed. In this recent picture you see no nail fungus on the left side any more.
In the first picture, the front of the nail had the most fungus and was brownest. In this recent picture, the frayed edge of the nail looks much worse in terms of mechanical damage, but note how light its color is. The nail fungus is almost fully gone.
The frayed edge actually makes it easy for the Pythium oligandrum to penetrate the nail, so from now on treatment will progress faster. Severely damaged nails are very common with this type of treatment, as the nail fungus keeps the infected nail moist and held-togehter by its own biomass. The infected nail is brown and smelly, the curing nail gets lighter and lighter, is dryer, smells less and eventually the damaged part of the nail will be replaced by new, healthy nail. At least that's what we hope will happen :-)

But the nail bed is healthy and intact, so if the patient sticks to the treatment guidelines, we expect a full cure.

The patient is sticking to the treatment guidelines but it looks worrisome. Note how there are light spots near the nail bed. We're assuming that those spots are Tinea fungus, embedded in the nail. The same spots are visible in the first picture, so it would appear as if no progress has been made eradicating the nail fungus from inside the nail. Pythium oligandrum can't infect human tissue, so it is unable to go inside the nail as Tinea fungi can. We will have to see how the nail looks like when it has fully grown back, but at this stage I'm assuming that some nail fungus will remain inside and underneath the nail. Tinea seems to like oxygen though, hence the worst affected areas were at the edges and top of the nail. Perhaps when the nail is fully regrown and baths continue, the remaining Tinea will not be viable. At this stage, it is not even sure that those white patches are indeed fungus.