I’ve had two plantar warts on my heel for around four months now. About a month ago I went to my doctor (for something totally unrelated) and mentioned the warts and they told me to use salicylic acid to get rid of them, which I’ve been doing, once or twice a day for the past few weeks. The smaller one has shrunk considerably, and is in fact mostly gone due to some DIY surgery on my part, but the larger one (which is around the size of a dime) has not, and is just as painful to walk on as ever. Normally I am in favor of letting nature take its course, and wouldn’t have used medicine/talked to the doctor at all, but this is the time of year when I like to take long walks and I want to get a bike soon, and neither of those things can happen if I keep on having this large, painful wart.
I have a follow-up doctor’s appointment in a week for something else, and I’m going to mention the wart again, but I’m afraid they’re going to make me freeze it off or have an operation, both of which would take several sessions (and at $10 a copay, that’s a lot of money) and be painful. So my questions are: what can I do to make this go away before the appointment, and/or what can the doctor do that will get rid of the wart in one session? I don’t care about pain nearly as much as the money factor. I have already tried prying it out with tweezers and sanding it down with an emery board, but neither of those things has done anything for the big one. (I managed to pry out the little one after it was weakened by water and acid.)
(And yes, I know I am asking for medical advice but seeing as how it is just a wart and I am “under a doctor’s care,” I don’t think this goes against the rules.)
Doing the emery board thing never really worked on the one plantar wart I had, either. I used the salycilic acid pads and then some fingernail clipers or cuticle scissors to cut the dead flesh out of the area. The thing about the salycilic acid is that it will kill the wart flesh more quickly than it will dissolve it, so you really have to continually expose it to “new” wart flesh in order for it to be working.
I feel for you, though…a dime sized wart on your foot is not fun, and will take quite a while to finally remove unless you opt for surgery.
I’ve had warts frozen off before. I didn’t find it extraordinarily painful and I only went one time. After they were frozen I got some sort of goo to finish them off, and they’ve been gone ever since.
Hm, the nurse who saw me said it would take several sessions, but then again he was only a nurse. Maybe I will bring freezing up with the doctor and see if they will do it during the appointment, saving me a copay.
Mostly I am frustrated with the acid. The bottle said the wart should be gone “in 14 days” but clearly it is not. How long do these OTC remedies take to work, if they’re going to work at all? (BTW, this isn’t the pads, I got a bottle of stuff you’re supposed to paint on after soaking your foot.)
Apparently warts can be removed by covering them with duct tape; cut a little circle of the stuff and stick it directly to the skin over the wart. Leave it there - if it falls off, stick another piece in the same place. Apparently, it works by moistening the tissues so that your body’s immune system can gain better access to them.
My own story is that I had a plantar wart that the dermatologist froze, and then lasered. The wart seemed to have disappeared, but a couple of months later it showed up and grew even larger than before.
I got rid of it for good (or at least, for a year now) by using the salicylic acid pads. The package contains small plastic disks that are full of salicylic acid, and very sticky, very cushioned round bandages. You put one of the disks on the wart, cover it with the bandage, and leave it there for 48 hours. Then you take it off, make an effort to get rid of the dead stuff, and put on a fresh disk and bandage.
I imagine that this system is better than the brush-on acid, because it keeps the medicine in constant contact, and constantly sort of moist, so the acid can move around and do its thing. The wart doesn’t stand a chance (die, fungus, die!)
It did take quite a while–about a month, to get rid of mine. But, in my experience anyway, it did a better job than the dermatologist.
I had some very unsightly warts on the sole of my right foot for over a year. The duct tape method was the only thing that worked for me, plus it was so cheap and easy. The only downside was that it took about a month for all traces of the warts to go away, although maybe that is the norm for most OTC wart removal remedies… I’m not quite sure.
What I read was that it works by keeping oxygen away from the warts, thereby killing them.
I remember the time I removed every trace of the wart off with a cuticle clipper. It was a month into my duct tape treatment, and I noticed after one cut, I revealed a lighter, clearer skin.
If you are cutting the skin off and the skin is still somewhat dark and it it dotted with what appear to be very, very, very fine red blood vessels (they’re not, as they don’t bleed and are very thin and short), you’ve still got warty skin.
I guess the first time I realized the duct tape was working was when those red things seemed to be purging out from my skin.
