Small splinter in the bottom of my foot… help?

June 20, 2022 6:40 AM

On Saturday I got a small splinter in the ball of my foot. It’s tiny, only about 4-5mm long in total (though I can’t fully see the other end) but I cannot pull it out because it’s fully embedded and there’s nothing to grab onto, even with my best razor-sharp tweezers. What do I do?

This wouldn’t be a huge problem except I can feel it when I walk — there’s a pokey, stabby pain when I put weight on that part of my foot. The pain itself is manageable but the feeling of something poking into my foot makes me very uncomfortable.

So far I’ve managed by cutting a ring shape out of moleskin to keep the pressure off the splinter, wearing socks and cushy shoes everywhere, and walking with a bit of a limp, but this is getting old. I’m really hoping it will work itself out in a few more days… but if not, then what? And how can I make myself comfortable until then? Is there anything I can do to help it work out faster?

Fortunately, the area around the splinter doesn’t seem irritated or inflamed so I’m not worried about a big health risk other than the pain. The skin it’s stuck in is pretty thick and calloused but it must be just long enough to reach the sensitive skin underneath.

Things I’ve tried:

- Soaking in warm water
- Soaking in warm water with baking soda
- Sanding that part of my foot with a heel callus remover (in the hopes that the sanding would pull out the splinter and/or allow it to work itself out further)

Things I haven’t tried, but will soon:

- Soaking in water with Epsom salts

Let me know if you have any wacky ideas, I’ll try them! This feels so silly because it’s such a tiny splinter, but it’s a major week-ruiner.

posted by mekily to Health & Fitness (21 answers total)

When I had a tiny splinter of glass in my foot, I put a blob of antiseptic cream on it overnight (under a sticking plaster), no rubbing in, just sitting on the surface. To my surprise, when I took the plaster off in the morning, the glass came away with it, the cream having drawn it out.

Worth a try?
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:47 AM on June 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: The way my mother (and her mother) did it was to take a clean needle and gently poke it under the most accessible end of the splinter. Then you can lever the end of the splinter out from the skin and grab it with the tweezers. I still do this, and it works much better for me than letting nature take its course.
posted by pipeski at 7:02 AM on June 20, 2022 [13 favorites]

Best answer: I used to exclusively walk around barefoot, and only put on flip flops at stores that I previously had issue in. So I got some practice with dealing with the occasional deep splinter; more usually metal or glass than vegetation based.

If a tweezers wasn't enough to get it because it was too deep, I'd get some fresh, sharp razors (think like an exacto knife?), and would scratch an X over the entry side would to widen it so I could dig in with fine pointed tweezers. Often if it was somewhat shallow I could widen it enough that fine tweezers could grab on and pull it out. Sometimes I needed to use a needle/pin to poke at the sliver and try to reverse, or lift it in combination with tweezers.

A few times it was too deep and I didn't want to dig deeper. The widening was effective so that I could take a hydrogen peroxide soaked cotton ball and hold it to the wound to keep the area clean, or at least minimally infected. If you do that at least 2x daily, and keep the entry site open, as the body heals, it will slowly push out the foreign object, and infection will be kept to a minimum despite it being a puncture wound which are susceptible to infection. I think the longest it ever took was about 8 days for a glass sliver to be pushed back enough that I could finally dig it out.

Although after accounting for walking a bit weird to minimize pressure/pain in that spot, it might be been better to have gotten a cheap scalpel and given a more serious job to a deeper cross cut over the entry point to actually dig out the object rather than wait for your body to push it further out.
posted by nobeagle at 7:26 AM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hydrocolloid bandages are awesome at drawing out thin little splinters. They are also way more widely available than they used to be, so you shouldn’t need to travel anywhere special or order them. Wash your foot, dry it really well, pop on a bandage, cover with moleskin or a snug sock, go to sleep. Give it a day if you can manage.
posted by Mizu at 7:26 AM on June 20, 2022 [11 favorites]

Best answer: I had a splinter like this last year but glass, very tiny but still caused me a lot of pain and discomfort, sorry you're dealing with it!

I ended up going to an urgent care place after trying pretty much everything you listed. The doctor there attempted to cut an incision and extract it but was unable to. He sent me to a foot doctor who did something totally different that worked: scrape with a razor blade "perpendicular". in other words, instead of cutting or slicing with the blade, the foot doctor scraped with the blade like shaving ice or something. This was on the ball of my heel, and the foot doc scraped until the glass surfaced and then just kept scraping to take flakes off the splinter until it was all gone. The foot doc never tried to grasp the splinter and pull it out

IANAD, IANYD etc etc but I thought it was interesting that the urgent care doc and foot doc had such different approaches with different results. Not sure if you'll have different experiences with a non glass splinter, but I figured I would share

Good luck and hope you get it out somehow
posted by okonomichiyaki at 7:42 AM on June 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Similar to pipeski’s needle technique, I use a clean new X-Acto blade, with the back of the blade towards the skin and the sharpened edge facing away. I slip the point in alongside or on top of the splinter so that the edge cuts a tiny slit in the skin above it and makes it easy to extract.
posted by jon1270 at 7:46 AM on June 20, 2022

Best answer: A razor blade, as mentioned above, is what I have done in the past. Soaking it in at least 70% isopropyl alcohol first isn't a bad idea.
posted by eotvos at 7:51 AM on June 20, 2022

nthing razor/side of a new needle. When I did this (once with a shard of glass my roommate missed when cleaning up a Heineken bottle in carpet, once with a splinter from plywood), I went to professionals who used scalpels (Heineken) and the tip of a new needle (plywood) to slice open as little as necessary and grab it. I can't see the bottom of my own feet, (yet... come on yoga practice!) so it was worth the copay to be done with it. So if you're open to it, some kind of urgent care or even a podiatrist would be able to help before it gets worse. (What I would do, left to my own devices, is hobble around weirdly trying to keep weight off that foot, and wind up spraining the opposite ankle, or torquing my knee, or throwing my back out, or something comparably frustrating on top of a splinter in my foot. So it's worth it, if that's an option.)

My mother swears by the kind of drawing salve that people used to use on horse's hooves. She still calls it "black salve" but you can't look for that on the internet anymore because apparently that name has been co-opted by some snake-oil cancer charlatans.
posted by adekllny at 9:24 AM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

It’s fine to go to urgent care for this if you have the access to that in terms of time and money and transportation. I did that recently for a splinter in a tricky part of my hand.
posted by needs more cowbell at 9:27 AM on June 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

Seconding the black salve idea. It goes by “Ichthammol Ointment” these days.
posted by cabbagesnkings at 10:00 AM on June 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Definitely go to urgent care if you can't get it out. A few years ago, I did not and wound up in the doctor's office with a really gross abscess leading to a large wound and a couple weeks of antibiotics and no swimming while it healed.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:18 AM on June 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Your normal doctor's office can also handle this, if that's an option available to you.
posted by donajo at 10:25 AM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Primary physician, urgent care, podiatrist (chiropodist in Canada)
posted by kschang at 10:33 AM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I recently had a shard of a plate embedded in my foot that refused to come out with tweezers as it was below the surface of my foot. Soaking in hot water with plenty of regular table salt caused it to poke out a little bit more, such that it could be removed with fine tweezers.

Given that it has been a couple days, you might need to make a small cut to help get it out, which is a technique that I have used frequently in the past.
posted by ssg at 12:55 PM on June 20, 2022

Best answer: I have a walk in the woods barefoot kid and I split lots of firewood, so I take out splinters all the time. My regular toolkit is good tweezers, sharp knife, and the surprising star - toenail clippers. For splinters in calloused part of the feet or hands I snip parts of the callous away with the toenail clippers until I can get at the splinter. Usually that's all it takes - unless it's in the soft arch part of the foot there's almost always a layer of dead skin you can snip away to get access to it. Sometimes if it's in too deep even after that I will try to catch the end with the knife and then pull it out with the tweezers, but that's pretty rare so I would defer to the above answers.
posted by true at 1:10 PM on June 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

I have an old wood deck, and I use fire wood, and I get splinters a lot. A paste of baking soda and a bit of water, kept on with a big bandaid, helps. I've used a needle, really a big safety pin, which is easier to hold, to dig for a splinter. A friend uses toenail clippers to cut away skin to get to the splinter. The soles of the feet heal fast.
posted by theora55 at 1:47 PM on June 20, 2022

Medi-point sells single use, disposable sterile lancets that are a godsend for stubborn splinters, sold under the brand name Splinter Out. They come in a small plastic case, and are a flat 1/16 inch long blade (not a round needle tip) with a non-blade metal handle. If you're in the trades or otherwise doing things that get you lots of splinters, the same product is sold in bulk without the branding/case at a comparative steep discount.

These are a useful tool, but must be used with care and proper hygiene.
posted by enfa at 1:58 PM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I've had good luck with white athletic/first aid tape or duct tape.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 2:26 PM on June 20, 2022

It's totally fine to make a doctor's appointment for this. I will second okonomichiyaki's recommendation to try to foot doctor of some kind. I had a small piece of glass embedded in the ball of my foot for about a month this winter, but I thought it was some kind of blister or callous. I went to the podiatrist for a whole different reason and asked him to take a look at that, and he pulled out the glass. Likely I'd go to urgent care first (I had to get a referral for the thing I needed at the podiatrist's office anyway), but if you can go to a foot expert, that's great too.

Folks are giving all sorts of interesting suggestions, but there is a risk of infection if you keep poking around down there, and it's okay to take use the health care system for things that seem like they should be minor but you can't resolve on your own.
posted by bluedaisy at 2:37 PM on June 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I have heavily calloused feet and get the occasional deep and aggravating splinter like this and my technique is more or less like jon1270's. A good hot soak for my foot and then digging a little bit along the callous to open up the area some more, under the principle that the splinter left a bit of a hole on its way in. Dig around a little, then try to get the splinter out when you've removed some of the callous above it. Keep everything clean and bandage it well when you are done. And yes, it's fine to go to urgent care for this also. Good luck!
posted by jessamyn at 6:47 PM on June 20, 2022

Response by poster: WOOHOO!!! I got it! Thanks for all the great suggestions.

For posterity: First I did a warm water soak with Epsom salts, then I used a sterilized razor blade to very gently clear away some of the excess skin around the splinter. Finally I used the technique of scraping the blade across the skin, which drew the splinter out JUST enough that I could grab it with tweezers.

Upon inspection, this thing is actually a very tiny glass shard, rather than wood, which explains why it was so nasty. Whew! Slapping on a hydrocolloid patch now for good measure and going to bed.
posted by mekily at 7:28 PM on June 20, 2022 [7 favorites]