Lucy:
Hi, I’m Lucy from the Foot and Ankle Clinic in Darlington. And today I’m going to be talking about PACT.
Now, PACT photodynamic light therapy is a way to treat fungal nail. A lot of people come into us and they’ve been struggling for years. They sort of haven’t worn sandals or gone swimming or been showing their feet for years, and it really, really bothers them and they’re quite distressed about it. But PACT is a great way to try and treat fungal nail infections. So this is actually a patient that came into us, and you can see the result there. They obviously had a fungal nail infection here in those patches, and six months later it’s almost all grown out there. So it is a really great way with no health risk whatsoever. There are no side effects because it’s applied locally to the toe, so no other harmful effects on your body. So it’s a really good way to treat fungal nail issues.
Why does fungal nail spread to other nails?
Speaker 1:
So with fungal nail, if it’s in one nail in particular and all of a sudden you find that it takes off and it goes to other nails, there are two main routes that it’s going to do that via. The first one is going to be as you’re clipping it, you’re basically clipping the end of the fungal nail and then moving on to the next nail with the pair of scissors that you’ve just clipped the fungal nail with. At that point, it will pick up spores and pass it to the new nail, to the uninfected nail. Now, it may just go through all the nails. It may pick out certain nails.
The other way that it transfers is through basically fungal infection within the skin, because it’s the same thing. So, you can have athlete’s foot, and you can get this on the hands. It’s less common, but you do get it on the hands, and it works in the skin.
Speaker 1:
And there, the problem is that nails are just skin, so eventually what tends to happen is that you’ve got athlete’s foot, you’re not aware of it because the signs and symptoms aren’t quite what you’re told to look for, but it’s there for a long time. Over a period of time that then gets into the nails, and before you know it, it starts to spread quite rapidly.
Speaker 2:
Which is why it’s really important if you think you have athlete’s foot, or you know you have, that you start to treat it and get on top of it really quickly.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.