The efficacy of duct tape vs. cryotherapy in the treatment of the common wart (2002) | Hacker News Reader

The efficacy of duct tape vs. cryotherapy in the treatment of the common wart (2002)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

140 pointsnixass138 comments

When I was a kid I had lots of warts on the back of my hand. My mother took me to her cousin, a respected dermatologist. He said that Plan "A" was the "witch doctor cure": I had to steal a banana (buying it would not work). I then had to eat the banana without anyone seeing me, rub the inside of the banana peel on the warts and then bury the peel in the garden, so that it would never be found. Plan "B" was cryotherapy. I tried Plan "A", and it worked! The only concern is that now, almost 70 years later, I am telling the story and the warts could come back :-)

Get ready to steal another banana

I'm semi confident "banana peel" was also on the list of wart treatments I had years ago, so I'm guessing the pertinent part was likely rubbing the peel on the warts.

The rest of the instructions surely was effective in ensuring that the banana rubbing would be done for long and hard enough!

No, the pertinent part was having a ritual. There’s a little understood pathway in the brain and immune system where you can will your body to attack the virus that causes warts.

There’s another cure that involves tracing it on paper and burning the paper every day until the wart is gone.

The last time I had a wart, I decided to cut it out because I was so sick of having it on a tender part of my finger. I know for sure I didn’t get the base of the wart, but within a week both that wart and my other tiny wart were gone. I just finally had enough of the freeloader and my body got the message.

Both bananas and potatoes are sources of potassium. Perhaps that's pertinent.

I don't know.

I know biofeedback is a real and useful thing and may account for at least some of what people dismiss as placebo effect.

But I'm not personally a big believer in that stuff being particularly significant medically. I think it's more likely that a ritual helps keep the mind focused on "I want this gone!" And that may subtly alter behavior in ways that support the desired outcome without the individual knowing exactly what they did differently.

Historically, some doctor had a track record of referring patients for an STD test (syphilis iirc) much earlier than usual and consistently being right. Rather than pretending he must be psychic or a magic voodoo witch doctor or some bullshit, they put two other doctors in the room with him to see if they could spot what he was seeing well enough to refer patients for testing without being able to tell you why.

This is how an earlier, subtler symptom was identified -- an eye flutter -- and that empowered other doctors to look for it too so they could refer patients for testing earlier as well instead of acting like he was all special and no one else could possibly do what he did. (Of course, earlier identification generally translates to better medical outcomes.)

My feeling is that while the general subject may be mostly woo with some potential to bear results as we understand it better, there are definitely data points around warts are interesting, in part because the results are relatively unambiguous compared to many other problem domains, and substantially more so compared to something like autoimmune disorders or weight loss.

The problem is "life is chemistry." So it's challenging to track all the factors at play and identify the pertinent ones and draw a firm conclusion.

If potassium is a means to treat it, you can increase your potassium intake by eating differently without consciously realizing:

A. I increased my potassium intake.

B. My increased potassium levels are the real reason my warts went away -- or at least one of the pertinent factors.

Most dietary studies are "observational" and also self reported. These are both weak means to make any kind of cause-and-effect connection and there's no obvious way to improve on it because it's generally considered unethical to experiment medically on humans by doing extreme things to them and also if you don't lock them down and have absolute control over them, you will not know for certain that they weren't sneaking food not listed or making themselves throw up on purpose or something.

People have all kinds of bizarre behaviors around diet and routinely actively hide it from other people or outright lie. People with eating disorders usually don't tell their social circle they are anorexic or bulimic. They hide that fact.

How do you get people to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about their diet? How do you make sure they report every single candy bar grabbed from a vending machine during a busy workday? How do you ensure they don't fib about something because they feel X is socially unacceptable?

Presumably, if you tried, you would get self-selected volunteers who saw themselves as "eating right" and generally fitting a particular pattern of consumption. You probably wouldn't get a lot of volunteers on "weirdo" diets and if you did, how do you meaningfully compare data for your vegan participant and your carnivore diet participant?

And that's just diet. There are other things in life beyond diet that impact health.

Funny. I had a plantar wart on my foot for years and nothing could touch it. I found an old book that mentioned to put a slice of eggplant on it every night before you go to bed and it would be gone within two weeks. Sure as shit, after two weeks, it had shrank, then went away.

Those old wives tales have some truth to them. (or having grown up in the deep south, we just blindly believed them)

Well, eggplant (aubergine on my side of the pond) is a member of the nightshade family, so I wonder if that's got something to do with it.

Yes, lots of alkaloids, polyphenols, anthocyanins, phenolic compounds. It was apparently an old cure for early stage skin cancers as well.

I heard potato (and you had to burry the part you didn't use) and garlic (with no magical ritual), and they both worked well.

Back when the duct tape study came out, one theory was that anything irritating the area enough to get the immune system to kick in would work.

For people who haven't ready the article, duct tape worked twice as well as cryothérapie.

> I hear potato (and you had to burry the part you didn't use)

We were told to cut the potato in half, rub it on the wart, put the potato back together and bury it.

Eggplant has a lot of nicotine in it (relative to most plants not a cigarette). Maybe that has something to do with it?

I have no clue. I read it in an old book that I read maybe 40 years ago. And for the life of me, can't remember what book it was... it wasn't the Foxfire series, but it was something old Appalachian home remedy related.

Not a lot of references that I have found.

https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/eggplant-banished-w...

poison oak was supposedly a chumash treatment for warts. i tried it and it worked! grind up some leaves into a paste, sand the wart down a bit, apply the paste, and cover with tape. it may be that the poison oak is enough to trigger an immune response which actually rids you of the wart.

Sounds like a plausible theory. Nudging your immune system into flooding a response to the area and giving everything a closer look, via irritants, makes sense.

And also explains the diverse array of purportedly efficacious substances.

I received microwave treatment for veruccas. It was administered via a fancy machine, that produced microwaves at the nozzle of a meter-long pipe.

The purported mechanism of action was not to destroy the verucca, although that was the immediate effect; they didn't try to hit all of them. The purported mechanism was to cause damage that would provoke the immune system; it would learn the properties of the virus, and then attack it wherever it found it.

It worked; all my veruccas disappeared, including ones that hadn't been zapped.

I have to say that this was easily the most-painful medical treatment I have ever undergone. Each targeted verucca got a 5s blast, twice per treatment, over a programme of three treatments. Each blast caused me to scream out loud and swear. I apologised to the podiatrist, saying I hoped I hadn't annoyed her neighbours. She said not to worry, everyone screams and swears. It was like having a sharpened red-hot screwdriver pushed into the sole of my foot.

Do they not numb you up for this?

I wouldn't be surprised if the pain was a necessary part of the treatment to trigger a full immunity response. But I'm am not a doctor.

I would be extremely surprised if pain was part of it, and think it best to try it without pain on the first go at the very least because "fuck unnecessary pain"

Often warts don’t have nerves. If you’re very good you can excise one without hurting the patient.

yeah, the three times or so I've had a wart I've used the wart remover (some kind of weak acid) to remove a layer at a time over a few days and it worked well. Whenever the new layer was "sensitive" that would be it for the day and no plucking at it. Eventually you get to the "dead capillaries" that are usually present at the bottom of the wart, and after a couple more layers that would be it. It didn't take weeks though, it was a few days of attentions. I think next time I might do a few layers and then put the duct tape on it, and put a bandaid over that to hide the duct tape :)

I was not given local anaesthetic or sedatives. I think they would have offered me sedatives, but the whole deal would have taken 3 or 4 times as long. They might have wanted my pain response to tell them they had missed.

The pain was only during the jolts; when the treatment was over, I put back on my shoes and socks, and walked home (under a mile).

I can take pain; but I'll fkin scream and swear if I need to scream and swear. Basically, if I can stand the pain and not pass out, then I'd rather not be numb while some sawbones is hacking away at me.

According to TFA, what may have worked is the tape.

I remember that study with mice where some mice were kept in a simple environment, while others had a rich environment with all kinds of things like a mouse wheel.

when the mice died, the simple environment mice had lots less interconnected neurons in their brain than the complex environment mice.

turns out it wasn't the complex environment that caused the brain development, it was the exercise wheel.

No way am I going to collect poison oak leaves and mash them up into a paste. You'd likely get some airborne aerosols doing that which wouldn't be pleasant.

I dont think that aerosols is a real risk. It is quite difficult to create particulate small enough (<1um). Wet grinding should eliminate any small risk that exists.

The Placebo Effect really works sometimes!

No reason for it to be placebo. Probably any irritant has a good chance of working.

Another old remedy just involves paper, pencil, and a fire.

Surely paper touching a wart doesn’t do anything substantial other than trigger the placebo effect.

We need to set up a study comparing the placebo effect to... let's see...

My M.D. father, family practice in the army, later a pathologist, would do what he had learned from other doctors: Put some dye in toothpaste, put it on the wart(s), bandage it, talk about what a miracle cure it was etc. He said it worked the few times he tried it. His M.D. son (my brother), partner in a pediatrics group, points out that placebos are ethically troublesome for doctors.

Don't worry, until someone on the list finds the peel, you're in the clear. Just never turn on location services.

With the exception of patients who are immunosupressed, all warts will resolve spontaneously with time, however it can take years in some cases.

This was a small study and not replicated by this controlled trial: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abs...

Usual order of treatments is topical salicyclic acid +/- occlusion with tape -> cryotherapy / topical imiquimod -> curettage / CO2 laser / pulsed dye laser / DCP immunotherapy

(Dermatologist)

Eh, years can easily be ‘a decade plus’.

One therapy that also seems to work well for really persistent hand and foot warts is water bath thermal hypertherapy.

[https://www.ccjm.org/content/ccjom/29/3/156.full.pdf] [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9078316/]

Bonus - it can be rigged up with a cheap thermal PID controller (Amazon), an immersion heater, and some kind of pot. Less than $100 in parts and some basic electrical knowledge.

or you can get rid of your disease-ridden roommates. When I got my own pad, my plantar's warts self-resolved.

Gyms are also a big problem too, on that front.

Usually though, the issue is the bodies immune system being unable to ‘see’ the specific viral strain causing the wart, and hence clear it. Stress can contribute.

HPV (the group of viruses at the root of warts) is really adept at hiding, once it gets a toehold somewhere.

So either physically killing/removing the tissue it’s hiding in, or triggering an inflammatory response enough that the body finally recognizes the invader and attacks it seems like the plausible method of action for these cures.

Once they’re gone, they almost always stay gone entirely for the rest of your life - unless there is a severe immune compromise + re exposure.

“once it gets a toehold”

I see wart you did there.

What do you think of Cimetidine?

Not found it to be helpful

It’s fascinating to have such different opinions on a basic question like this. I have no idea which opinion is more accurate.

I claim no expertise and only have anecdotal experience, but Bleomycin was effective for me when treating plantar warts. It's an off-label treatment but FYI in case you'd like to investigate for another possible arrow in your proverbial quiver.

Just to be clear: this treatment was administered by a dermatologist.

Yes this can be helpful

Firsthand experience: If you have warts that aren't resolving and finally get a better diagnosis than "hypochondriac" for other health issues, this may help you sort out how to finally fix the warts.

Inference: If you have persistent, treatment-resistant warts, wonder what else is wrong that you can't seem to fix it.

Can you give some more context if you are comfortable sharing that?

Not OP, but I had a few warts. Tried cryotherapy for them, but they came back, just slightly to the side of where the original wart was.

The thing that managed to have them gone? Less stress.

Things were pretty stressful in my life when I got them and while I was stressed out, they were there. Once life got a bit less stressful, the warts just kinda went away.

There are other comments in this thread mentioning folk remedies too. It may just be a bit of a placebo effect at play too. You think it works, and due to the magic/madness that is 'biology', it somehow does. The placebo effect is a pretty strong remedy in a lot of cases un/fortunately.

I had bad warts on my foot. I tried the over-the-counter remedies (salicyclic acid, do not recommend), and it only spread all over the foot. I went to the doctor who stated they could freeze it off, but if it was down in the nerve, the pain would be intense.

I didn't know what to do, so I did nothing. A few months later, all gone! No trace.

How then, can we know that the treatment worked/did anything at all?

Timing mostly. If the thing doesn't budge for two years and then gets better in a week with treatment, it probably worked.

In many cases very difficult to know for sure

> Usual order of treatments is topical salicyclic acid +/- occlusion with tape -> cryotherapy / topical imiquimod -> curettage / CO2 laser / pulsed dye laser / DCP immunotherapy

Salicylic acid seems to be the standard of care here, so I'm curious why tape was compared to cryo in this old study. Was that not true at the time?

I used to be a big swimmer and due to some carelessness with footwear in the gym shower I ended up with a wart on the bottom of my foot some years ago. I tried acid alone, which seemed to be working (albeit slowly), so I added duct tape over top which seemed to speed things up a bit.

I didn't expect the tape was "doing" anything beyond keeping everything in place and then ensuring that I was exfoliating fully between applications, but who knows?

Not sure but salicylic acid can be purchased without prescription so might be hard to find patients that had not already used it

To add my story, there is another solution that is available.

When I was born, I had a wart on the bottom of my foot that I never thought anything of. But during my teenage years (~20 years ago), the wart started to multiple. It eventually became a small wart colony on the bottom of my foot and began to bother me. I went to see a foot specialist. They discovered that warts are actually a virus and could be treated by taking an oral medication. Apparently, the virus responds to something in a pig's liver ( I don't remember the name). But I took this pill for a few months. The Dr said, if the virus responded to the medication, the warts will start to turn black and begin to spread throughout the body. The black skin is the wart cells dying off. The medication has a really high efficiency rate (I think it was like 70-80% of the time it works). He was right. I went about once a week where he would scrap the dead black wart cells off my foot. The warts also spread to my thumb and finger. But keeping to the medication. They all went away and the skin grew back ( no marks or scaring). It was literally like magic. Yes, it hurt when he scrapped the dead cells off and it took a long time (~3 months maybe?). But they never grew back. The Dr said they will never come back because my immune system will fight it.

To add to the duct tape part. I believe (can't remember), at first, That the doctor would apply duct tape to my foot to help speed the effectiveness of the medication. But only before it started to turn black. Afterwards, he just used a bandage. I didn't use or need it for my hand though.

Do you still have your medical records around in order to share the name of the treatment with HN? It sounds fascinating.

Not OP but I have a hunch they used Cimetidine as there has been much debate over it throughout the years. One example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14693487/

It’s typically used for stomach acid but I know of doctors who use it off label in higher doses for viral warts … which I thought all warts are fwiw, but perhaps I’m wrong.

Funny, this article says 'they don't know why it works'. I remember the doctor saying that as well. "We are not sure what it is. But we know the virus responds to it and has been effective." So, maybe that was it?

Sorry, this was a long time ago when I was in middle school to high school. As a kid, who would know to keep that? That was all I could remember. My family and I thought it was essentially magic. Even if the black spots on my hand were unpleasant looking for a while. (Knock on wood) They never came back since.

A replication study failed to confirm the result.

DOI: 10.1001/archpedi.160.11.1121

DOI: 10.1016/s0093-3619(08)70425-8

DOI: 10.1016/s0084-3954(08)70300-2

Relevant, but 3x as many children had the wart disappear entirely for duck tape as opposed to placebo, which was not significant due to the size of the sample and because total disappearance was rare overall (which are a result of choosing "complete resolution" in 6 weeks as a thing to pay attention to and the power of the study itself to find differences in such a rare outcome.)

It also found 27% size reduction for duck tape vs. 9% for placebo, which was significant.

> Complete resolution of the treated wart was seen in only a few children. The first resolution in both the duct tape and placebo groups was noted after 4 weeks. At the end of the study, after 6 weeks, the warts of 8 children (16%) in the duct tape group and the warts of 3 children (6%) in the placebo group had disappeared (Table 2), resulting in a number needed to treat of 10 (95% confidence interval, 5 to ⬁). This difference was not statistically significant.

> In the duct tape group, there was a diameter reduction of 27% (from a mean of 4.6 mm to 3.4 mm) after 6 weeks. In the placebo group, this was 9% (from 4.4 mm to 4.0 mm). When adjusted for the baseline diameter, this resulted in a statistically significant difference in diameter reduction of 1.0 mm between the 2 groups (P=.008).

https://doi.org/10.1001/archpedi.160.11.1121

I can't find the second two; the first one [1] is simply inconclusive; small sample sizes but no real effect. Crucially, this one compares duct tape to placebo (a corn pad, which seems to be a foam ring that surrounds but does not cover the wart).

The original study is from 2002, the first study linked above is from 2006.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17088514/

This is something I fought with for years and I tried nearly every trick imaginable. The only thing that has ever worked (and for me personally, it has a 100% success rate) was zinc sulfate supplementation. I applied the methods used in this paper[1] and it worked unbelievably well.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11952542/

You took 10mg/kg ? Any stomach upset or other side effects?

[edited to remove comment about Recommended Daily Allowance (USA) which is about a different form of zinc.]

Yes I did. It definitely caused some nausea for me when taking on an empty stomach, but taking it with even a small amount of food seemed to eliminate that entirely.

I used to have a really big wart on my big toe, and was creeping down onto my foot. Nothing I could do would get rid of it. I'd have regular cryotherapy, tried the duct tape, lots of other stuff (including me attacking it with a knife once -- was not a good idea). One day I had a very traumatic bicycle accident that involved my ankle getting sprained and the skin being cut down to the bone in multiple places (not near the wart).

Whole foot and ankle was wrapped up in bandages for a couple months, when the bandages came off my wart was gone and never came back.

Would not recommend, but it seemed to work (or it was a coincidence)

I had a similar event with a wart on my palm. Tried everything but it wouldn’t go away until one day I had a bicycle crash that ripped it out. Much blood, never returned.

I would assume the bandage wrapping would produce a similar environment to the duct tape cure, just a bit more enforced and extreme.

Maybe, but I kinda doubt it. The bandages weren't water-tight around my toes.

I suspect the relevant thing was that there was increased immune activity in my foot due to the wounds (or it was just a coincidence)

As it was explained to me warts are caused by a virus, which at some point the local skin tissue no longer attacks. Any treatment that provokes the immune system in the area without damaging the tissue too much has a change of waking up the immune system to the wart's virus.

If that is true it is no surprise to me all sorts of folk medicine work on warts.

Also, most warts spontaneously resolve with no specific treatment.

I'm prone to plantar warts, and the only success I've had has been from surgical removal. I have not tried duct tape, though.

Once I went to a podiatrist who injected bleomycin, a chemotherapy drug. My foot hurt for several days and blood blisters formed beneath the warts, but the operation was unsuccessful.

I went to another podiatrist for the same warts and he anesthetized me and removed them with a curette.

Several years later I had a few more show up, and got some of the same anesthetic the second doctor had used, which worked marvelously. Unfortunately I didn't remember which anti-bleeding agent he had used and so I was less able to tell what was going on during my self surgery; ultimately, though, it was effective.

I also had a wart between the third and fourth knuckle of my left hand for many years. I'd pick at it sometimes but it was benign otherwise. One day I noticed that it was gone. The spot where it had been gets dry and flaky moreso than the rest of my hands.

I’d use prescribed wart medication that would make the wart soft and pliable. I would scrape the skin, exposing what I assume were root-like threads and pull them with tweezers. I’d use iodine to clean the spot and put a bandaid on it. They wouldn’t grow back.

I never tried duct tape and haven’t had warts in decades.

I have removed several warts in a similar way. I just use a razor to progressively shave them away during my hygiene routine when I trim my nails. After 3-4 times the root of the wart is exposed, "dries", and crumbles away. I imagine it is a simple matter of removing tissue faster than the wart can grow back. I assume this isnt standard practice because most people are scared of cutting themselves and doctors dont do it because multiple visits aren't practical.

Is the thickness of skin superficial to the blood vessels constant even on the wart area, or has the wart additional skin, making it thicker in that area than usual? Or, a different way of putting that, if you were to follow the normal contour of the skin when shaving the wart down, would you end up drawing blood?

A wart itself protrudes above skin level and extends below normal skin level.

They have much more visualization than adjacent tissue, and you can see this in many medical diagrams.

When I cut, I do it horizontally in layers, until blood just starts to bead from cut vessels. In my experience, the wart will always start to bleed before the adjacent healthy tissue. The vessels naturally die back from the new surface, and the process can be repeated in a few days.

> The vessels naturally die back from the new surface, and the process can be repeated in a few days.

Interesting; are these (presumably clotted) blood vessels the threads that another comment mentioned? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40417294

You can see a digram of the blood supply here [1]. If you look at this paper, you will find several warts with black dots. Those are blood vessels which have reached the surface.[2]

https://sanderspodiatry.com.au/blog/2021/02/23/plantar-warts...

https://www.dovepress.com/dermoscopy-features-of-cutaneous-w...

Yes, in my experience. Warts form in the epithelium, and are usually covered by a layer of dead skin cells. I guess they hijack a blood supply from lower layers of the dermis, because black dots on the surface of the wart are blood vessels (the epithelium doesn't normally have blood vessels).

For clarity, the wart is skin. Veruccas are flat because you walk on them; otherwise they are identical to warts on your hands, which do project past the surrounding skin.

Thanks for responding! Maybe I have had a verruca on my thumb, then: for many years I had a dark bump on the pad of my thumb, which was painful to touch, and then it appeared to 'sink' into the skin. I don't suppose there is any reason why one's (healthy) skin cells wouldn't cover over the wart given an opportunity, and maybe the continual pressure on my thumb gave it just that.

>I don't suppose there is any reason why one's (healthy) skin cells wouldn't cover over the wart given an opportunity, and maybe the continual pressure on my thumb gave it just that.

I suspect what you were seeing was not it sinking in, but reducing in diameter, as your immune system consumed viral cells. Imagine the cross section of a cone decreasing as it is pushed out of a surface.

I'm not a doctor.

1. Veruccas are warts on the soles of the feet. If it's on your hand, it's a wart.

2. Warts are normally skin-coloured, or greyish, or yellowish.

See a doctor.

[Edit] I think some people refer to some kinds of mole as a "wart". If your lesion is dark, then maybe it's no kind of wart at all, but a mole, i.e. a melanoma.

> Conclusion: Duct tape occlusion therapy was significantly more effective than cryotherapy for treatment of the common wart.

I really didn’t expect that.

There seems to be several studies demonstrating that. I can't seem to find anything on why this works. Why is it always duct tape?

My guess is duct tape doesn’t do anything special to warts but the adhesive and the tight seal causes you to shed a few layers of skin. Repeat for weeks until you have shed all of the wart containing layers and replaced them.

Salicylic acid ointment also works much better than cryo therapy. The same idea but probably a lot faster than duct tape, but also probably a bit more painful.

Compound W sold in the US is basically what you just said.

The active ingredient in Compound W liquid is Salicylic Acid.

And in my experience, the band-aid style treatment worked much better than the kind you brush on. I guess just keeping it in place all day through hand washings, etc was what helped.

I think it's just starving it of oxygen. Duct tape just stays in place well enough. Any tape that doesn't breathe and sticks would do. But maybe I'm wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape_occlusion_therapy

I was under the impression it got its oxygen from the blood.

That link seems to suggest some mix of maceration (skin breaking down due to humidity), acting as a keratolytic (causing excess skin growth which mechanically separates the wart) and an immune component. Which makes sense - warts are caused by HPV.

If that were true, those tiny tubes of cyanoacrylate would be sold as wart remover.

It works for chiggers, although if one is sufficiently hirsute the cure may be worse then the disease.

https://bushcraftusa.com/forum/threads/super-glue-for-chigge...

Warts only seem to form when your immune system deems them "below threshold".

Presumably, the continuous irritation from the duct tape causes your immune system to say "Oy, there is irritation here. Go find the source and stop it." At some point, your immune systems notices "Hey, there's a virus here that we weren't paying attention to. Let's get rid of that."

There are stories of people who talk about how they had a couple of warts and then "something" injured one of them such that blood came out and suddenly all their warts disappeared simultaneously. Presumably their immune system "noticed" and then cleared the virii out systemically.

I used to have a list of possible wart treatments from a military hospital thanks to trying to resolve a treatment-resistant wart. It included:

1. Tape a piece of potato over it.

2. Tape a copper penny over it.

3. I high dose of vitamin A for a month.

4. Vitamin E topically and/or orally.

The apparent juxtaposition of the first two lead me to conjecture that a mild current from skin capacitance disrupts the wart.

https://www.instructables.com/Potato-Battery-Understanding-C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_capacitance

I have no idea why the potato supposedly works (it didn't work on the wart in question), but copper is known to kill microbes "on contact" though it takes a bit of time.

Or the reality is that the vast majority of "remedies" for things that average people experience are nonsense and have no method of action.

Or are worse than nonsense, like all the people over the centuries who have insisted on treating a burn by applying butter to the area.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape_occlusion_therapy

I had warts for years as a kid, I had one large on my left palm, that somehow transferred to the same place on right palm and a few little on fingers. Cryotherapy did not help as they grew back soon. Supposedly anti-wart band-aids did not work. What finally worked was onion. Cut onion, rub it on the wart few times a day. They were gone in a few weeks and never came back. It worked like magic and I could literally see them getting smaller every day.

I was looking at this recently. Although duct tape doesn't always win vs cryotherapy, it's definitely a valid treatment:

* Silver duct tape occlusion in treatment of plantar warts in adults: Is it effective? (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dth.13342) found that cryotherapy outperformed duct tape over a 8-week treatment period.

* Duct Tape Occlusion Therapy in the Treatment of Plantar Warts (https://conservancy.umn.edu/items/4e958e09-839b-4496-972f-cf...) is a case study of treating one one patient with large plantar wart.

* Successful treatment of refractory plantar wart with duct tape (https://www.jaad.org/article/S0190-9622(21)01507-3/abstract) is another similar case of treating a refractory (treatment-resistant) wart with a duct tape.

Several years ago I had a wart on a finger. I used Compound W Nitro Freeze on it (not the other Compound W which is salicylic acid). So basically an at-home OTC cryotherapy. It only needed one treatment, and the wart fell off a few days later and never recurred.

A year or two after that, I got a plantar wart on my foot. I gave it the same treatment with the same result: the wart fell off within a week.

In both cases, the treatment was painless, with no apparent damage to other tissue and no scarring. Needless to say, I recommend this stuff. Be sure to read the instructions thoroughly before using.

https://www.compoundw.com/products/compound-w-nitrofreeze

What worked for me after multiple years of trying to get rid of one of these damn things is salicylic acid plaster held in place by wrap. You have to apply acid to it on a continuous basis to get it to dissolve enough and trigger the immune system.

I had one on my heel for the longest time. I tried duct tape, freezing, all sorts of OTC tricks. Eventually a podiatrist tried this beetle acid stuff "cantharidin" and that knocked it out in 3-4 treatments. Hasn't come back since.

Here's what worked for me on my palms and sole: I gently scrape off the upper layers of the skin on the affected area with a skalpel, close (but not reaching) the point of bleeding, which then I cover with a generous amount of table salt. The salt sucks the blood through the thinned layer of skin resulting a small redish heap. After approx 10-20 minutes I wipe off the salt with alcohol. During the next 24hrs a relatively thick scab develops which falls off during the next couple of days.

Turn a can of computer spray upside down and it becomes DIY cryotherapy. Cover the healthy skin with aluminum foil or ducktape, or you will burn yourself. Obviously, do not breathe the propellant.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/10454/what-cause...

Safer method:

Get a can of "air" that still uses the smaller size of straw (they've broadly gotten bigger in recent years).

The OD of this straw is close-enough to that of the plastic tube of a Q-Tip.

Cleanly off one end of the Q-Tip, nice and square, and then install the cut end into the nozzle on the can.

Then invert, point away from people, and spray for just a second or less.

The refrigerant travels down the tube in largely liquid form. It boils off and evaporates once it reaches the remaining cotton end of the Q-Tip, becoming stupidly cold.

Congratulations, you now have a DIY cryotherapy rig.

It boils off fast and is coldest whilst still boiling. One should experiment with it first to get an idea of how it works.

With the valve disengaged (finger off the trigger), touching the still-boiling liquid on the remaining cotton Q-Tip end to the wart will flash freeze it.

Wear eye protection in case it goes wrong (which we should all be doing anyway when dealing with compressed anything, including canned "air" in its intended use).

(This method also works well for dispensing just a tiny, controlled amount of lots of other stuff that comes in aerosol cans.)

I did this several times, and what worked on the successful attempt was to engage the valve partially, creating a slow trickle of the cold liquid. I placed the end of the tube to the wart, and let the liquid pour over it until it visibly turned a lighter shade (presumably from freezing). The previous times, just a few drops was not enough to achieve this. The challenge was to balance the valve just the right amount so that it doesn't overshoot the affected area.

I’m writing this because I suffered for years with warts on my fingers next to my nail bed that would never go away. I used to take razor blades and try to get as close as I could to the nerve endings in the warts.

The only thing that worked was “Mr Flanders Magic Wart Cream” out of Oregon. I’d like to thank the random lady who saw duct tape on my hands, and gave me the suggestion to try it out. If you suffer from warts, try getting the cream it’s worth it.

This product appears to be no longer available for sale... based on the patent at https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180098989A1/en , the active ingredient was Fluorouracil, which turns out to be a pretty potent chemotherapy drug for skin cancer patients. https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-16269/fluorouracil-topica... https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/treatment/drug...

So that's probably why it is no longer being sold over-the-counter as a magic wart cream. It is used for warts and generic Fluorouracil cream can still be prescribed by a doctor, but it's probably a good idea to pay attention to the cautions/warnings.

No type of physical removal or topical treatment worked for me. What eventually got rid of them was when I was prescribed terbinafine to treat toenail fungus. I couldn't take it for more than 2 weeks due to side effects which wasn't enough to get rid of the fungus but at least I don't have any more warts.

I don't think this "treatment" has actually been tested so take this as anecdotal.

Oh man nail fungus is a whole other thing! Fascinating topic. If you believe random Redditors for example, going keto can get rid of it

My mother read in one of her urban legend "housewife tale" books that potato skins (white side on the skin, under a bandage) would remove all manner of skin issues. This definitely worked for warts, but I'm not sure if by the same mechanism as duct tape. N=1, but this also worked for some sort of embolism that I had on my wrist.

My kid had a wart on one foot, where he got a small injury while walking barefoot at the gym pool.

Doctor recommended soaking the foot in hot water (As hot as he could bare) and using "compound w" (salicylic acid) topically for until the wart was gone and a bit after.

After about 6 weeks the wart did indeed vanish an has not returned.

I've had probably the worst wart experience you can imagine, and the only thing that eventually "worked" was stopping the medication I was taking to suppress my immune system. I tried every treatment, even experimental but 3 weeks after I stopped my meds (a JAK inhibitor biologic): POOF gone.

I had a plantar wart that just would not go away. Frozen off and came back 3 times. Did the duct tape thing consistently for about 10 weeks. Worked great. It didn't go away quickly but after the 10 weeks I just kind of stopped doing it and at some point a while later just randomly noticed it was gone.

My personal experiment, after having read about duct tape and this on a normal but stubborn wart on the leg:

Home cryotherapy - did nothing - I tried it about 9 times.

Duct tape - Made my leg itch, gave up after 5 days.

Bazuka (normal salicylic acid stuff) - worked! Although it took its time - like 10 weeks.

From my experience, neither has been efficient.

I could not get rid of warts for 3 years. The plantar ones were unkillable by cryotherapy and small warts that were spread throughout hands would come back. I took HPV 9-valent vaccine, I am not sure whether it helped or not but it could have increased immune response to the family of viruses. About 6 months after the last dose, I started eating garlic every day and increased dose of vitamin D-3 and C (6,000 iu and 1500mg to be exact) which I have already been taking daily. I have noticed that 5 days in, a hard to treat wart on my thumb started getting smaller. A few weeks later there was no signs of multiple plantar warts. Ever since I am just not getting warts. Sometimes when I miss a lot of sleep one will pop up on my hand for a few days and disappear. It's an immune system issue. It was not placebo either, I have increased vitamins doses / started eating garlic for completely different reasons and was surprised to see the wart disappear all out of the sudden.

Also there were multiple studies where the efficency of inter-lesion administration of the vaccine had quite high success rate. This is a recent one I could find now: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1346-8138.1... I'm guessing this is not going to get very popular though, cryotherapy is like SaaS, the vaccine is buy once. The doctor I visited earned good money to run his freezing device which accounted for a 10 minute visit. It's a shame because while having persistent warts is not the end of the world, it's a really pesky problem to have and there are solutions to it, but they are not easily available.

I had some big awkward ones, one right under my big toe. I kept using pumice stones on that one like a demon until my immune system got the message and did the business.

Lots of anecdotes on cures so here is mine: had loads of warts through childhood. Received cryotherapy but they returned. In my teens got a summer job priming tobacco and within days they completely disappeared and I haven’t had another decades later.

I have one that wouldn’t go away for the longest time tried duct tape and cryotherapy and the thing that did it in was coming both.

I had one that wouldn't go away, and I slowly ramped up the freezing time to be a fair bit longer than what the instructions said, eventually it worked

I think the problem with cryo is it’s so painful that doctors dont do it long enough to be effective. But it also does a ton of damage to the surrounding tissue so overall it’s just a terrible treatment.

Cantharidin is another way that works for many, where some blistering liquid (originally from a blister beetle, but I think its synthetic now) is put on the wart, causing HUGE blisters that take off many layers of skin at once, and often the wart with it. But it really sucks that first few days.

Interesting. Never heard about this. Did an MD do this treatment? If yes, in which country?

My guess: Canada?

I knew a nurse that would smuggle bottles of it back to the USA from Canada.

It has a fascinating history :)

what people don't realize is that by putting tape/etc. on a wart for any extended period, there's a chance you may cause some minor nerve/circulatory issue whereas cryotherapy doesn't have the risk... I always opt for cryotherapy when my kids have a wart and it works perfectly/quickly/easily and no issues...

Damn, I was burning mine using silver oxide. I went a little overboard with that I have chemical burn scars to proove it.

Can't wait for the study with duct tape in conjunction with wd40. This is nerdy stuff :D

Is it only duct tape that works? What about other kinds of tape or bandages?

any kind of airtight waterproof tape that will stay on skin will probably work eg white nonporous medical tape

"One patient enrolled in the duct tape arm lost his study wart in a trampoline toe-amputation accident and was also not included in our analysis."

Nor was the cryo group was spared from trauma:

" 1 young child actually vomited in fear of pain before each application."

Which also goes to show it's a good thing studies like this are conducted even though warts are 'harmless'

(2002)

Crushed up aspirin is another great and accessible treatment for warts I have found to be effective.

Given mention of Salicylic Acid in other comments, using aspirin makes sense as they have the same active compound.

Salicylates have been derived from the willow tree bark. The Sumerians were noted to have used remedies derived from the willow tree for pain management as far back as 4000 years ago. . . . It was not until 1899 when a modified version named acetylsalicylic acid was registered and marketed by Bayer under the trade name aspirin.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519032/

Aspirin should be less effective. But you could try crushed Aspirin with a drop of vinegar. This should give you Salicylic Acid. Vinegar alone is also a treatment.

Edit: Both Salicylic Acid and Aspirin inhibit Cyclooxygenase in your body. This is the main mode of action. Aspirin is much softer to the stomach. Against warts, the acidic effect should be the important one, hence, contrary to oral consumption, Salicylic Acid should be the preferred choice.

I, as a 8 year old kid witnessed a tiny bit of vinegar pickle used by a"barber " for warts.Egyptian "barber surgeon" in early 1900s used to be one who perform medical and grooming services from treating warts to bloodletting, tooth extraction, and minor surgeries, in addition to providing haircuts, shaves. One of those barbers blinded Taha Hussien, one of 'the most influential 20th-century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, and a leading figure of the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. ' He contracted ophthalmia at the age of two, and as the result of false treatment by an unskilled practitioner, he became blind' 'In 1950, he was appointed Minister of Education, in which capacity he led a call for free education and the right of everyone to be educated'-held the position of chief editor of a number of newspapers. ' I have read many of his novels and never imagined he was blind at the time, it was not an issue or perhaps never brought up.

Should not be too effective. But Salicylic acid (the non-ester form of Aspirin) is a common treatment and should be more effective/aggressive.

In Europe, it is sometimes combined with 5‐Fluorouracil.

Wow, it's not every day I hear about 5FU! It's an incredibly potent anti-cancer drug and one of its quirks is the active dose is very close to the fatal dose, and there is high variability amongst individuals wrt dosage. It (probably) works by inhibiting a protein that makes the T DNA residue from making more T, which is fatal to rapidly growing cells.

https://compendium.ch/product/24263-verrumal-los

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