Most people think of an ingrown toenail as a painful nuisance handled with warm soaks or a quick visit to a foot specialist. For one 44-year-old man in South Korea, it ended with an irregular mass on his right big toe measuring about 7 by 4 by 8.5 centimeters, roughly 3.3 inches at its longest and bigger than a golf ball.
Orthopedic surgeons affiliated with Jeonbuk National University Hospital removed the growth and sent it for testing. It was not cancer. Their case report in the journal Medicine, published in January 2024, identified it as a hypertrophic scar, an overgrowth of scar tissue, driven by years of irritation around a chronic ingrown nail.
