If you think you have a fungal infection in your fingernails or toenails, see your doctor. By looking carefully at your nails, your doctor might be able to tell if you have an infection. To be sure what kind of infection you have, your doctor might scrape a little bit of tissue from a nail and send it to a lab. It might be a few weeks before your doctor gets the results of the lab test. The test can tell if you have a fungal infection or another kind of infection.
Several medicines can treat a fungal nail infection.
Your doctor can help you decide about treatment. You might need to take the medicine for 6 weeks. You might need to take it for 6 months, or longer. It depends on where the infection is and how bad it is. Don't use the same nail trimmer or file on healthy and infected nails.