[malfist]

I had the opposite experience. I went with an ingrown toenail to a urgent care, and was prescribed antibiotics that did nothing.

I finally went to a pediatrist who explained that people have ingrown toenails often, but it's typically not an issue. The only time you notice you have an ingrown toenail is when it becomes infected. He said that sometimes the antibiotics cure the infection, but it leaves the ingrown toenail intact to become infected again at a later date. He also said that it's hard to predict what type of bacteria will infect the toenail so it's hard to treat it properly and the antibiotic is a shot in the dark.

What he did was cut the ingrown toenail out with his special scissors and told me that if that toenail became ingrown again he'd do something called a "partial nail matrixectomy" My toenail became ingrown again about a year later and he did the matrixectomy. What happens is the toenail grows from a "matrix" at the bed of the nail, and they burn a tiny section of it with an acid and it scars. This prevents a few millimeters of the nail from growing, preventing it from ever becoming ingrown again. The toenail functions perfectly normally and looks normal after about a year.