Huffington Post Blog - October 2012
by Amy Rothenberg, ND
Some years ago a patient came into my office with an unusual complaint: He said he had a capellini condition. For those less familiar, capellini is a very thin, rod-shaped spaghetti enjoyed by many pasta lovers. He held out his hand to show me the problem. He had an infection around his thumb nail, an acute paronychia. He had been washing dishes a few days earlier and could not dislodge a piece of capellini adhered to the bottom of a pot. Scrub as he might, it would not come loose, so he used his thumbnail to get under the pasta to try to dislodge it. Up it came, but unfortunately, it wedged between his nail and his nail bed and snapped off, a small splinter under the nail with no part of the splinter protruding.