Hello, this is Dr. Jairo Cruz Jr. with Advanced Podiatry and I’m here to talk to you today about dropping things on your foot and what to do about it.

Unfortunately, this past week we’ve had a lot of trauma at our office. One individual dropped some kind of bottle of olive oil or some heavy liquid bottle of something and it fell right on his second toe and crushed the tip of his toe. So, some may say okay, it’s just a toe.

But in our eyes, it’s a big deal because medically speaking, if the crushing injury is causing enough damage to the nailbed which is underneath your nail plate, it can cause an opening in the skin and therefore have the bone exposed to the outside world.

Having your bone exposed to the outside world is probably not a good thing considering all the bacteria that surrounds your toes and also the world around you. So, it is advisable to seek medical attention after any kind of injury to the tips of the toes or any other foot injury that you may suffer.

Unfortunately, these types of injuries that I’m specifically talking about where they involve crushing injuries of the toe and opening of the skin underneath the nail plate, these are considered open fractures. And an open fracture is essentially where the bone is exposed after some sort of trauma. So, these are taken very seriously because unfortunately they can possibly lead to massive infection if left untreated and also loss of a toe or a limb if the infection is great enough and the person does not take care of the problem immediately, then they can suffer major consequences which would not be favorable.

It is my advice that any kind of foot or toe or ankle injury be seen immediately by a podiatrist or a specialist in foot and ankle and get it treated because the sooner you treat it, the less complications you’re going to encounter. If you wait and delay the treatment, it may lead to complications such as delayed healing, no healing, amputation, infections, increased pain, chronic pain. You name it. That’s why we do what we do, we fix things immediately, things that need to be fixed immediately we fix and that’s a reason because we just don’t want the complications, we don’t want our patients to suffer.

If it’s something that can wait, we will tell you that at your visit. We’ll say, “Okay, let’s wait a couple of weeks for the swelling to calm down and then treat it.”

Most of the time, we treat things very conservatively. So, offloading or putting the patient in some kind of boot or surgical shoe so that the toes or the foot doesn’t move as much, doesn’t bend as much to not further any more injury to the area that’s already been affected.

If you have any questions, please call our office at (813) 8750555 or visit us on the web at www.thetampapodiatrist.com.