Looking at statistics, a significant percentage of plantar’s warts reoccur, even after excision.
HOw can this be? If the virus is physically cut out, how can it reoccur–it’s dead and gone is it not?
I think the infected tissue can go quite deep, so in some cases, maybe it isn’t entirely cut out.
In other cases, maybe it’s reinfection. The wart itself is a virus factory - the virus subverts your skin cells to the purpose of producing copies of itself - I’d imagine these copies tend to hang around in shoes, especially, ready to re-infect the wound site from where the last infection was removed.
According to wiki:
It’s not something you can vaccinate against. Think of it this way-you can catch a cold, or the flu again, so why doesn’t it stand to reason that you can be reinfected with warts again? They’re also contagious, so you could pick them up again at say, the pool, if you walk around barefoot in the locker room, or whatever.
(Having had plantar warts years ago, I highly advise wearing flip-flops in said locker rooms. Those things are really disgusting, and good Christ, do they HURT!)
I’m hoping my plantar wart infestation never returns. I had plantar warts on my heel, starting about 10 years ago. Started small, got bigger and bigger, until my entire heel was a cluster of probably 30-40 warts. Still, they never hurt (surprisingly), so I didn’t do anything about them. Then it started spreading…new warts appearing here and there on my foot. At this time, I chose to go to the doctor. I did cryotherapy on them, and it helped on a few of them, but never did a darn thing to the cluster. I thought I’d eventually go get them cut out, but I was in the Army at the time, and I didn’t want to be unable to walk or run for months while it healed.
Then, 5 months ago…they disappeared. ALL of them. All the little satellite ones, and ever bit of the cluster. Gone. Needless to say, it was VERY strange. I have no idea why they went away so suddenly, but they did. Now, of course, if they reappear, I’ll treat it immediately, but it was just so strange. I guess my body got sick of having the virus there and finally attacked it. 
I would have to say that the virus is still somewhere in there, though, lying dormant.
That’s just “plantar”, btw, meaning “to do with the sole of the foot”. cf “plantigrade”, “walking on the soles of the feet” as distinct from, say, “digitigrade”, “walking on the toes”, which is what critters with paws mostly do, or “unguligrade”, “walking on the nails”, which is what hoofed mammals do. It’s not a proper name.
I could have sworn it was “planar wart”, not “plantar” with a “t”.
I’ve had one in the same location for probably 10 years now.
I didn’t know they DID come back. Decades ago I had a huge PW, not treated for a long time because I didn’t know what it was. It was surgically removed, and the doctor said it would never come back. And it never has.
The same thing happened to me!
Ok, I hadn’t had them for quite that long, nor did I have as many, but I had a dozen or so warts along the big toe and a few of my smaller toes on one foot. They didn’t hurt and, while I knew they were probably not great to have, I never went to a doctor. I had probably had them for 6 or 9 months, slowly spreading and growing, and then, poof, gone. Every single one, and I’ve never had one since (about 4 years now).
Me too, only mine went away after resisting aggressive treatment, only to seemingly be eradicated by a course of antibiotics taken for an unrelated condition. I know it makes no sense whatsoever that antibiotics would affect a viral infection, but it – apparently – worked for me.
That is a good one to remember,
I had 2 PW’s when I enlisted in the army. While in CA(Ft. Ord) I had no problem with them, When I transfered to GA and the high humidity they became a problem again. I did see a Doc but it wasn’t working fast enough. I dug them out with my pocket knife and have never had them again(Knocks-on-wood),
But a wart can be bought and sold. I bought my grandsons and it went away. But I don’t have it either :dubious:
This is probably TMI and squeamish folks may want to skip this post.
I was a swimmer for about 10 years in my youth and I have terrible warts on my feet. They even spread to my hands at one point. Anyway, there was one particularly nasty wart on my left foot with a number of other ones spread around. One day, after showering, I started picking at the mother of all warts (MOAW). It was totally disgusting, but after a while I found a little “stem” inside that looked like a dark red or brown hair sticking up from the center. I plucked it out, which was incredibly painful and I bled quite a bit. I decided I’d gone far enough so I bandaged it up and went about my day. Within the next month or so, all of the warts on that foot died off and disappeared. Perhaps they were all part of a hive network controlled by the MOAW.
FWIW I was told that large doses of Vitamin C can be helpful in clearing up warts. I tried that (2 standard supplement doses per day) and all of my warts were gone in 6 -12 months. Coincidence? Placebo effect? I don’t know, but at least they were gone.
Whiteknight, I had a similar experience. I had a large (maybe 10 mm in diameter) plantar wart on the ball of my left foot. As it grew, it started to affect how I was walking, especially stocking-footed, which made me think that it was getting quite deep. I went to my doctor for two rounds of cryotherapy, to no result (other than my girlish squirming in the doctor’s office).
One night, I was sitting reading SDMB, idly picking away at the thing. It started to bleed around the perimeter, where the hard body of the wart meets the normal skin surrounding it. I went in the bathroom and performed contortions to get my foot up on the counter to take a better look.
At that point, the wart looked like a solid cylindrical mass, loosely attached to the surrounding skin. I was desperate to finally get rid of it, so I found a sharp implement and started trying to free the body of the wart from the skin around it. I worked my way around the wart until it was a mostly free-standing bloody cylinder, but it was still firmly attached at its root, and the more I tried prying at it, the more pain I felt. By this time, it was bleeding quite a bit, so I decided to admit defeat and bandage it up. I had a hell of a time walking at all the next day, but the whole episode didn’t seem to phase the wart, and it returned to its full 10-mm glory.
Then, one morning a couple of months later, I looked down at my foot and the wart was gone. Gone with barely a trace. I couldn’t believe it; it must have disappeared and healed very rapidly, over the course of a couple of days or so. It was the highlight of my week, if not the year.
I’ve seen no signs of it returning, though I try to keep an eye on it, in case there’s anything I can do to nip it in the bud the next time 'round. It’s an experience I really don’t want to repeat.
I don’t know if it works on feet too, but I had three very stubborn warts on a finger a few years ago, which nothing would shift, until I used this stuff called Wartner. It comes with a foam applicator thing that you spray with an aerosol, then the liquid evaporates and freezes the applicator. You press the frozen applicator onto the wart and hold it there, chilling the wart into submission. The skin goes white and everything.
Two doses of that, a week apart, and they disappeared rapidly and haven’t been back.
I transcribe for a podiatrist who calls them planter’s warts (or maybe planters’ warts?), and it makes me crazy. He should know better, after all.