Corns can be a common ailment of the foot which can be painful and difficult to treat. They are caused by an excessive amount of pressure on an area of skin. They are part of a natural mechanism that has gone wrong. Whenever there is too much pressure on the skin, that region of skin will thicken up to protect itself. When the pressure continues over a longer period of time, it might be so thick that it is painful. This is similar to the process that occurs when, for example, chopping wood. Doing this, you eventually develop a callus on your palm. A similar thing happens on the foot with pressure from the ground or pressure on a toe from the shoe. When you stop cutting wood, the thicker skin on the hands go away. The problem in the foot is that you keep putting on 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 actually easy and a competent podiatrist could easily remove them. That's the easy part. The difficult bit is preventing them returning. It's one thing to remove them, however if you don't take away that cause (the higher pressures on the skin), chances are they will just return eventually. Corns don’t have roots that they can re-grow from. They come back because the cause remains. Removing a corn is a lot like dealing with the symptom. They are going to return unless the cause is removed. That's where the skill of a podiatrist is needed to identify the proper cause. A complete assessment is required of the biomechanics, footwear, foot structure and activities to work out just what it is that causes the higher pressure. When that cause has been determined, then different treatments may be used to get rid of that pressure. This may range from simple shoe advice to foot orthotic to surgical treatment.