Today I was forced to go to the doctor because a mole that I’ve had for all my life grew over the weekend.
Doctor said it’s fine but while I was there I decided to have him take a look at my toenails. I have a fungal infection in them. He took a scraping and will have it tested but he’s pretty sure that it is indeed a fungal infection. If it is he wants me to go on an oral pill (Lamisil).
My understanding of Terbinafine is that it’s pretty bad for the liver and that topical meds don’t work for clearing up fungal infected toenails. According to what I’ve read about it online, there are lots of unwanted side effects.
Have any of you been on these meds? Know someone who has? Any personal knowledge of them?
I went on it and it worked as advertised! My nails were purely awful and I was always embarrassed by them. took the lamisil, and started noticing an improvement in about a month. It took about a year before there was all new nail and no trace of the old nasty nail was left. Today they look perfect, I can actually go barefoot in public now!
As far as side effects, I experienced none and your doc will have you take a blood test during treatment to check your liver, etc… The important thing to know is that it doesn’t work overnight, so don’t get discouraged. The damage that has already been done on your nails is not going away. The drug keeps the new nail from becoming infected and toenails grow very slowly. Also, my big toe nail was mis-shaped from the infection. It required the podiatrist to file it down with something like a Dremel tool. But the good news in 9 months to a year you will be like new again.
The best advice I can give you is to order the Lamisil from a Canadian pharmacy. Even with insurance the drug was big time expensive at the local pharmacy. I ordered from a Canadian one and the total cost of the drug was $75! The ony thing I had to do was fax my prescription to them and they sent it via US Mail. From my understanding Canada has a generic version of Lamisil, but it isn’t available in the US as of yet. Good luck to you.
Lamisil can irritate one’s liver! (But it mostly doesn’t, unless one has liver problems to start with. And if it does start to irritate the liver, stopping the drug generally results in everything going back to normal.)
I seldom prescribe meds for toenail fungus (because 99% of the time it’s only a cosmetic problem) but when I do, I almost always prescribe terbinafine (generic lamisil.) And I check liver function tests before starting and after 4 weeks of treatment.