I have been afflicted with this strange occurance for a long time now. The only thing that I can gather is that it is a cutical fungus.

In the cuticle of my fingers form clusters of black dots that look as though the could be tiny, black seeds. If I do not cut these out then my skin swells around them. When I was younger, they started out on my toes exclusively before spreading to my fingers. Now, they only occasionally appear on my big-toe (once every couple of years), but are constantly on any one of my fingers. Cutting them out keeps my skin from swelling around them; however, they reappear within a couple of days. The pain I expirience when cutting them is and the amount of bleeding is not appropriate for the surface from which they are cut (always just the upper section of cuticle).

I would just like to know what I need to do. As a child, I went to our family doctor and he treated it with indifference, not taking a biopsy. Since then, I've been cutting them out myself for about 9 years.