Corns can be a frequent disorder of the foot that may be painful and hard to manage. Corns are due to a lot of pressure on an area of the skin. They are part of a normal mechanism that has gone wrong. Whenever there is too much pressure on the skin, that area of skin will thicken up to protect itself. If the pressure carries on over a extended period of time, it becomes so thick that it is painful. This really is just like the mechanism that happens when, for example, cutting up wood. Doing this, you ultimately develop a callus on your palm. The same thing happens on the foot with pressure from the ground or pressure on a toe from footwear. When you quit cutting wood, the thicker skin on the palms go away. The problem in the foot is that you keep using footwear and you keep walking, so the pressure continues and the thicker skin forms into a corn and will become painful.
Getting rid of corns is comparatively easy and a skilled podiatrist can easily take them off. That is the simple bit. The hard bit is stopping them returning. It can be one thing to take them off, but unless you remove that cause (the greater pressures on the region), chances are they will just come back eventually. Corns don't have roots that they can re-grow from. They come back because the cause is still there. Getting rid of a corn is similar to treating the symptom. They are going to come back unless the reason is taken away. This is where the ability of a podiatrist is needed to identify the correct cause. A complete assessment is needed of the function, shoes, foot structure and lifestyle to work out just what it is that causes the higher pressure. Once that cause has been determined, then different interventions can be used to reduce that pressure. This can range from simple shoe advice to foot orthotic to surgical treatment.