Hacker News Reader

Comment by litoE | Hacker News Reader

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 :-)

View on HN

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

Get ready to steal another banana

Reply on news.ycombinator.com