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Comment by insonable | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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