Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
 |
Red felt-tip pens, duct tape, even focused thoughts: There's almost no end to the weird remedies for this viral infection in the skin. |
By SUSAN ASCHOFF, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 7, 2003
What is it about warts?
No other medical malady inspires so many touted cures with so little basis in fact.
And darn if some of them don't work.
In October, a study published in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine told parents to cover their children's warts with duct tape.
Huckleberry Finn said to rub them with the blood of a dead black cat.
And a Tampa doctor reports more than 20 years of success by coloring warts with a red felt-tip Flair pen.
"The first patient I tried it on, a 12-year-old boy, had a wart on his hand. I colored it twice with the red Flair," and it disappeared after a few days, says family practitioner David Lubin.
Of course, when he suggested the treatment for another child who had a wart on her forehead, the girl's mother quickly hustled her out the door.
"She thought I was out of my mind."
Warts frequently disappear on their own. Lubin and other doctors suspect that in many cases any benign treatment will work, acting like a placebo to make the patient "think" the ugly growth away.
"We know the mind is capable of curing warts almost overnight," says Joe Graedon, who with Teresa Graedon writes the syndicated columns "The People's Pharmacy" and "The People's Herbal Pharmacy."
"Since long before Huck Finn and the whole notion of dead cats," says Joe Graedon, "there have been a lot of home remedies. Doctors would buy warts by rubbing a shiny new penny on the wart. One of the most unusual (cures) we've had is using a magnifying glass to focus the sun on the root of the wart."
The Graedons get lots of mail about warts.
"They seem like such a silly thing," he says. "But they're an incredibly big deal."
Warts are caused by a viral infection in the skin. The virus is called human papillomavirus, or HPV, and causes skin cells to rapidly multiply into benign growths more embarrassing than threatening. HPV requires a warm, moist place to grow, such as a scratch or cut in the skin. Children's many scrapes, and their tendency to bite their fingernails, make them particularly susceptible. People with a weakened immune system appear to get more warts as well. The contagious virus lies in wait on locker room floors, used towels or other people's skin.
Common warts with the texture of cauliflower usually grow on the fingers. Warts may appear as flat spots in clusters on the face. Plantar warts are found on the soles of the feet and are flattened by the pressure of walking. These can be painful, feeling like a stone in one's shoe.
Genital warts are the most serious. Highly contagious and acquired through sexual contact, they can increase a woman's risk for cervical cancer.
Common warts are the ones that inspire the offbeat cures. Lubin says he got the idea to use a Flair pen when his daughter, then 10 years old, colored in the warts on her hand and they eventually disappeared. Lubin, aware that warts often go away on their own, next tried a Flair on a bump on the back of the family dog. The bump vanished. If the pen was acting as a placebo, how could a dog know?
At one point, Lubin phoned Flair's manufacturer to ask if it had heard reports of wart cures. "I spoke to one of the chemists. There's five different kinds of red dye" in a Flair, says Lubin, theorizing that one of the dyes may have a chemical that affects warts.
If the Flair fails -- as it has in several of his patients -- it does no harm, he says. Lubin's only words of caution: If you've colored a wart on your foot, let the ink dry before you walk on the carpets.
In the duct tape study, parents were told to cover their children's warts with a piece of duct tape for six days. After six days, the wart was soaked in warm water and filed with an emery board. The process was repeated every week for up to two months.
About 85 percent of the children were cured.
About one-third of all warts in children go away within three months with no intervention. But some doctors don't like the wait-and-see approach because it lets the virus spread. If a wart does not disappear on its own or a person has many warts, a visit to a physician is recommended.
The favored treatment is salicylic acid, which destroys the virus-infected skin cells. British researchers recently looked at results of 50 experiments using a variety of treatments for warts and found salicylic acid to be the most effective, with a cure rate of 75 percent.
Salicylic acid is found in products like Compound W and Dr. Scholl's.
Another medicine, dinitrochlorobenzene, worked slightly better but blistered and irritated the skin.
Physicians may also use cryosurgery (freezing the wart with liquid nitrogen), cauterization (burning the wart with an electric current) or surgical removal. These methods are sometimes as effective as salicylic acid but can be painful and leave scars.
The most promising research focuses on the body's own immune system. Recent studies have found that antigens, substances produced by infections that cause the body to make antibodies, are 75 percent effective when injected into a wart, reports the Washington Post.
Some scientists believe the psyche can boost the immune system and are using hypnosis to thwart warts, the Post says.
Researchers theorize that warts occur because the body has failed to recognize the invading virus. Antigens -- or focused thoughts -- make the wart shout: "Here I am! Come and get me."
Graedon is a believer in the power of the mind. Particularly when treating a child, he suggests inventing a remedy, one with lots of drama. "The more elaborate the production, the more likely the patient's mind will make a wart go away. It has to be a little unusual, a little exciting, a little scary, maybe."
Or quirky. Like a red felt-tip pen.
Here are a few suggestions on ways to cure warts, unproven but passed from neighbor to relative.
-- Cut a raw potato in half. Rub one half on the wart and put it on the windowsill. Throw the other half away. When the potato in the windowsill dries up, the wart should be gone.
-- The Old Wives Tales Web site says to bite off the wart, chew it and swallow, then spit on the spot every day.
-- Rub a baked onion on the wart and then bury the onion in the dirt under a full moon.
-- Tape a piece of banana peel, fleshy side down, over the wart.
-- Soak the wart in vinegar.
-- Rub the milky sap from a milkweed plant on the wart twice a day.
-- Paint the wart with iodine.