Sweaty feet / Smelly feet / Hyperhidrosis
This article will discuss normal sweating creating odour and excessive sweating of the hands and feet.
Perspiration has a purpose in humans, its evaporation allows the skin to cool and the body to dissipate heat. Unfortunately, wearing shoes all day stops this evaporation and allows the sweat to stay close to the skin and causing various problems. Sweat is really nutritious to bacteria and if the sweat stays in place long enough on your skin, socks or the linings of your shoes, quite a colony can grow. The byproduct of bacteria and fungi eating your sweat is the offensive odour your housemates hate.
Socks
Throw out all your socks made from synthetic material – they are not your friends. Replace them with socks that are 60–70% wool combined with 40-30% synthetic fibre. If you want to aim for the best socks, podiatrists sell socks made from bamboo fibre, which draw sweat away very effectively. You can even get some with silver woven into the material which will inhibit the growth of micro-organisms on the socks and on your skin. They are expensive but effective and can be worth the money, particularly if a foot infection is a danger to you, for example, a diabetic.
Wear clean socks every day. Wash socks on the hottest cycle using Milton’s (or similar) nappy wash and dry in the sun.
Change your socks in the middle of the work day if you sweat enough to soak the first pair.
Don’t skip wearing socks because the sweat will be soaked up by your shoes which are much harder to clean than socks.
Shoes
Prime importance is to stop the sweat from soaking into the material of the shoes where it will become rancid. Buy some washable insoles for your shoes, and wash them every day until the problem improves and then weekly after that.
Liners such as odour-eaters are cheap enough to throw away weekly and will go a long way to sorting out the shoes.
You can swab the inside of your shoes with alcohol such as mentholated spirits.
Try to avoid wearing the same shoes two days in a row allow them to dry out well.
Feet
Check the soles of your feet for hard, dead skin which becomes waterlogged when sweaty and an ideal environment for bacteria. Remove it with a pumice stone or a trip to the podiatrist..
Wash and soap your feet well at least once per day. Do it twice daily at first if bad. An antibacterial skin preparation can help. Check the chemist for a product intended for acne.
As an alternative, you could soak your feet daily in weak black tea, which contains tannic acid. It is thought to make the sweat glands ‘pucker up’. Boil two tea bags in half a litre of water for a quarter hour. Add this to 2 litres of cool tap water and soak your feet for 20–30 minutes. Dry thoroughly and do not put on shoes soon after. Let your feet air to get really dry.
Check in between the toes for white, dead looking skin, rashes or generally smelliness. Fungal infections love places that are warm, damp and dark. Use an anti-fungal preparation from the chemist that is based in either alcohol or oil as it will disperse the wetness more efficiently. Keep it up until the symptoms are completely gone and ten days more. If this is not enough to solve the problem, see a podiatrist.
Use a strong antiperspirant (which is not the same as a deodorant) which contains 20% aluminium chloride. This will be a man strength, sport antiperspirant. Give the feet a good spray prior to putting on shoes and allow a couple of minutes for it to dry.
Drugs. Some medications have been known to cause unusual foot odours. Try everything above first, then consult your podiatrist if there is no improvement.
Teenagers. Yes, its not your imagination, the problem is worse in teenage boys because hormonal changes trigger excessive sweating and hygiene may not be his priority. This may change ‘naturally’ under the influence of a girlfriend!
Hyperhidrosis. This is a condition where the feet (and usually the hands too) literally run with sweat output. You will find you can’t wear thongs because you slide out of them. You can’t lean on shop counters because you leave a big puddle behind. This is a condition where the sympathetic nervous system becomes overactive. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the stuff you don’t have to think about like beating the heart, moving food through the gut and, of course, sweating.
Pharmaceutical Interventions. Include anticholinergic drugs which interfere with the action of the sympathetic nerves. They can be effective but the side effects may be worse than the problem and include: dry mouth, blurred of vision, constipation and sleepiness. Bromide is also sometimes used but has other side effects related to virility.
Surgery can be performed to ablate (burn off) the sympathetic nerve and is called a sympathetectomy. It has been implicated in impairment of other autonomic functions and needs good consideration. You would need to be referred by your doctor to a specialist neurologist.