Your entire body is covered in thousands of hair follicles. Some of the hair can be quite thick, while other areas have softer, smaller hairs. Only a few parts of your skin have no hair follicles, such as your fingertips and lips. From time to time, any hair follicle can become infected. The resulting infection is known as a boil. If you want to use a fancy medical term, you can call them furuncles.
Boils can be extremely painful as the infection sets into the sensitive layers of the skin. Most boil infections are caused by common bacteria known as Staphylococcus aureus. Staph bacteria can cause a wide range of diseases, not just boils.
Boils can appear on any area of the skin, although they are most commonly seen on the neck, face, breasts, and buttocks.
Proper skin care and hygiene can help prevent a boil. People with poor nutrition or bad hygiene are often at increased risk for getting a boil. Boils are also more common in people who have weakened immune systems for any reason, such as illnesses or using medications which suppress the immune system.
Symptoms
Boils are very easy to spot once they develop on your skin. They cause a large dome shaped nodules who appear at the site infection. This nodule will be red and very tender to the touch. It can possibly ooze puss, although this doesn’t happen in all cases, especially early in the development of the infection. The skin around the boil can become warm as well. In all cases, the boil will be exquisitely painful.
Very rarely, and generally in more serious cases where there may be more than one boil at a time, an infected person can develop a fever. On examination by a doctor, the local lymph nodes will often be swollen.
Treatment
Treatment for a boil depends on the severity of the infection. In all cases, it is appropriate to keep the site of the infection clean by using clean towels and warm soapy water. Because the bacteria which can cause a boil has the potential to spread to others, it is important to wash your hands and any towels which may be used to clean the skin. Under no circumstances should you attempt to burst the boil yourself. This can cause the bacteria to spread to other sites on the body or to other people around you.
If your boil is particularly severe, your doctor can do a procedure known as an “incision and drainage” of the boil. This involves making a small incision over the site of the boil after the location has been numbed with a local painkiller. The small incision is then used to drain the fluid from the inside of the boil, helping to relieve the pain and aid in the healing process. This procedure should only be done by a doctor in a sterile environment. Do not attempt to cut and drain a boil yourself.
If the infection is severe enough, antibiotics can be prescribed. These can be given in the form of a topical solution applied directly to the boil, or an oral tablet taken by mouth.
Boils are not a medical emergency, but the sooner you get yourself to a doctor and have them properly treated, the more comfortable you will be.
