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The Doctors Book of Home Remedies II: Foot Odor

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Foot Odor

What gives? You already wash your feet regularly (with warm soapy water). You change your socks at least once a day. And your shoes are clean enough to prevent high school biology classes from making field trips in your closet to collect mold spore samples.

Still, those dogs of yours smell bad enough to make those around want to howl at the moon in agony. So the next time you remove your shoes (that is, after you and the rest of your ZIP code come back to consciousness), try these breath-of-fresh-air remedies for the all-too-common problem of smelly feet.

Take tea and see. "Using a soak made from tea bags eliminates the odor from smelly feet because the tannic acid in the tea literally tans the hide," says Jerome Z. Litt, M.D., assistant clinical professor of dermatology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. "You take a couple of tea bags and boil them in a pint of water for 15 minutes. Then remove the tea bags and pour the pint of strong, hot tea into a basin or a large pot filled with two quarts of cool water. Soak for 30 minutes daily for a week or ten days and you'll have no smelly, sweaty feet."

Try an acne fighter. "If your feet are really smelly--what I call toxic sock syndrome--examine the bottoms," says Rodney Basler, M.D., a dermatologist and assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. "If you have whitish soles with tiny pits, then you probably have a condition called pitted keratolysis. And since the organism that brings on this condition is the same species that causes acne, you can get relief by using an over-the-counter acne medication with 10 percent benzoyl peroxide, such as Oxy-10."

Use an antiperspirant. You can buy special foot deodorants, but here's a lower-cost alternative: Use an underarm antiperspirant, which controls odor and wetness, says Stephen Weinberg, D.P.M., a podiatrist who specializes in sports medicine at Columbus Hospital in Chicago. (Deodorants, meanwhile, only control odor.) His advice: Use a roll-on that contains the active ingredient aluminum chloride hexahydrate at least twice daily. Aerosols aren't as effective, since a lot of their oomph is lost in the air.

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