“My name is Schwartz.” (pause) “My name is warts?” A Warty Mystery
July 1, 2016 9:30 AM   Subscribe

I have a general question about Chet. Chet is the name I’ve given to the pernicious wart I’ve had on the bottom of my foot for almost half my life. How pernicious is Chet and do you have any suggestions for further treatment? Background inside:

So Chet is the teenaged wart I’ve had on the cushy part of my right foot. In reflexology, he lives around the heart and lungs area. I can kind of pinpoint the root around lateral and intermediate cuniform bones, between the third and fourth toe.

I don’t know where I picked him up. But despite years and years of treatment and resentment (and pain) he’s pretty much living the high life under a near-constant stretch of duct tape, making me miserable.

Why don’t I get him killed once and for all, you ask? Well here’s what we’ve tried over the years:

1. Years worth of year-long weekly and bi-weekly “freezing” at the doctor’s office, which would practically blind me with pain.
2. Cutting out with nail cutters. Pulling out the black “flecks” with sharp tweezerman tweezers.
3. A year of Duoplant: killed all of the skin around it, and I managed to get a bloody spotted raw bit of flesh where the wart was, but it was crippling, at constant risk of infection, and the wart simply came back as everything healed.
4. Holy water brought from Lourdes (really).
5. Prayer from others.
6. (weekly over months) Burning with “freezing” applied in the form of a cross and treated as a minor exorcism.
7. Believed “really hard” for years at a time.
8. Negotiations: with the wart, with the powers that be...
9. (for years) Duct tape treatment.
10. (for weeks) Garlic under duct tape.
11. ( for weeks) Banana peel under duct tape.
12. Rubbed with a penny and buried the penny.
13. Rubbed with potato and buried the potato.

Back in... oh geez, around 2007-2010? I took Chet to some kind of specialist who said (from what I recall – and this was many years ago) that I had two options:

1. I could get some kind of injection that would cause “12 different kinds of pain,” wasn’t guaranteed to work, wasn’t covered under OHIP, and would cost nearly $1,000.
2. I could “learn to live with it” and manage the wart symptoms. Clearly ongoing freezing wasn’t working, and my reaction to freezing was awful: my entire nervous system felt like it had been shocked. I would get intractable goosebumps and the pain would sometimes be excruciating.

Since then, that’s what I do: I file Chet down after a shower, take a tiny bit of cotton soaked in salicylic acid-based over-the-counter wart treatment and apply it directly on his stupid painful wart-head (which is flat but still painful). Then I cover it with the duct tape and go about my life. The tape takes about a week to get loose (I was around it in the shower) and then I pull it off, have another shower and re-treat. The foot files are changed after every few weeks. I file swiftly over paper towels, sometimes I hit blood, and fold everything up and dispose carefully.

Chet is still painful. I like to be Dressed to Kill, but the shoes... gad, the shoes pinch and sometimes I have to work treatment around footwear and fashion.

Here’s where my totally gross question comes in: does anyone recall the "Pig Brain Mist" Disease and the neurological condition it caused meat processors making SPAM? This phenomenon, though entirely unrelated to warts, makes my imagination run completely wild. Or this terrifying possibility that minute hair clippings can accumulate and hurt parts of the respiratory system.

What happens when I breathe in aerosolized (if there is such a thing) wart dust? I try not to, but I’m not wearing a mask. I do this frequently because it’s part of the treatment and I don’t really know how to get around it. What are the odds that I’ve got viral warts in my lungs right now?
posted by Dressed to Kill to Grab Bag (21 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Please go to a podiatrist or dermatologist, either one can do it, and have them shave your plantar wart down, and then you will put Duofilm (salycilic acid) *daily* or twice daily for two or three weeks, and there will be no duct tape involved. Then it will be gone. It will sting a bit the first few days, it will not be a life-altering pain.

They can answer any incidental questions you have about lung warts.
posted by Lyn Never at 9:51 AM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


I had a big mosaic wart on my foot a while back and managed to get rid of it after about 4 months of "treatment". I tried loads of things so I can't say exactly which thing I tried actually cured it, but one thing I did which you haven't mentioned was I took high doses of Cimetidine (aka Tagamet, the anti-heartburn med) while doing the cutting/filing/duct tape things you're doing. I tried Cimetidine based on some flimsy accounts online, so there's no justifiable medical reason for using it, but my IANAD baseless untrustworthy hunch is that it helped.

I had the same anxieties about warts spreading to other areas and as far as I know that didn't happen. I also soaked my foot in water with a (very) small amount of bleach before and after filing the skin with the thought that this might kill the virus on the skin filings and prevent me from spreading it elsewhere.
posted by duoshao at 9:53 AM on July 1, 2016


I had a plantar wart on the ball of my foot between first and second toes. Hurt like a mofo! I finally went to a podiatrist when home remedies didn't work and she performed laser surgery on it. It was at an outpatient center and I got some happy juice and some gas and took a great nap while she did her thing. I had to have it done twice (she didn't get it all the first time so it grew back), and it hurt (had a raw spot on the bottom of my foot...no stitches), wore a giant bandage and didn't walk on that part of my foot for a week (she gave me a walking shoe thing to cover the bandage) but that wart is gone! And now I wear flip flops in the gym shower.

Seriously, go to a podiatrist and ask what your options are since nothing else is working.
posted by MultiFaceted at 10:15 AM on July 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


1. Schedule a consult with a pulmonary doc, but be prepared for them to brush you off. This is such a specialized question that there is likely no literature on inhalation of wart dust. Doctors really like scientific literature.

2. Even though you have obviously been to a podiatrist before, perhaps it's time to try a different one. Not all doctors are created equal. Bring your treatment records with you. You might end up having some excising in a surgery center where they can anesthetize you and get ALL of it out.
posted by PorcineWithMe at 10:29 AM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Above the fold the OP says "do you have any suggestions for further treatment?"

I was able to get rid of a pernicious wart like this by doing the following:
  • EVERY evening, soaking the part of my foot that had the wart (in my case the heel) in apple cider vinegar for about 20 minutes
  • allowing my foot to air dry
  • every morning, using nail clippers to clip away any dead skin (that dried out overnight after the soak)--only dried skin, not anything living--don't make anything bleed
  • covering with a band aid/plaster for the day

    I repeated the above every day for months, and over time, the wart got smaller and smaller, and I was able to clip away more and more of the black dot centers as they dried out. Unfortunately I think the key to this is patience and consistency, but I can say it did work (and was less painful) after many other things did not.

    Good luck!

  • posted by msbubbaclees at 10:57 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


    Hmm. I (also in Ontario) just took a kid in for a wart on a toe and we were offered the choice of freezing or a topical liquid application that involved salicylic acid and a laundry list of other things. Almost instantly the wart was slightly swollen and a fascinating bright white. "It will blister and then the whole thing will fall off -- or at least that's how it's supposed to work. I just did this with my son and we only had to do it once," said the nurse practitioner.

    We're on day #2 and it seems to be turning into a nice gross wart-lifting/annihilating blister.

    I wish I could remember the name/other ingredients in the liquid. Googling around I wonder if it was not Canthacur, which I am mostly guessing at because I had read something about the effectiveness of cantharidin, and the product is Canadian.

    Just prior to this I had had two of the little bastards show up on my toes. One went away with a few applications of an extremely strong salicylic acid solution I use to make facial peels and other topical what-not; 50 or 55% -- Duofilm is 16.7% salicylic and 15% lactic acid. (You can get a very good price on lactic acid from saffireblue.ca and many eBay sellers and DIY skin product ingredient sites sell hi-test salicylic acids.) This also did the job for another one my kid had. It worked but did not have nearly as dramatic an effect as the liquid we got at the doctor's office. Like most kids we're not talking about a sky-high pain threshold, and while I'm told it doesn't feel terrific, it's not particularly problematic -- application was painless, too. (The other one I had was small and I aggressively took extremely small and sharp scissors to it, bandaged it, and on healing it the toe was wart-free.)

    I'd ask a doctor what they had to offer liquid-wise, and if it didn't do the trick I would DIY with acids. My strong salicylic acid-ing involved no pain. (For what it's worth, when I was talking with the nurse practitioner and mentioned 'salicylic acid designed for serious facial peels' on mine she said 'Oh, good idea!')

    The chap who thoughtfully passed on the wart virus to me fifteen-odd years ago had a large one on the sole of his foot; one go at surgery was wholly effective, albeit a tad painful to walk on for a short time afterwards (so, not much different from pre-surgery). I think you were offered strangely few options -- non-OHIP-covered treatment or "learn to live with it"? Definitely don't ask the same doc again!
    posted by kmennie at 11:50 AM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


    This is not medical advice, but as an overview there are a bunch of treatment for refractory warts--intralesional immunotherapy with mycobacterium antigens (yep, it actually works beautifully for about half the people who try it), intralesional bleomycin, topical imiquimod. Those are all treatments that would probably have to be administered by a dermatologist as most GPs don't have experience with them, although you could ask. Anecdotally I am also told by some derm friends that getting the HPV vaccine also seems to be helpful for refractory warts for some people even though the strains of HPV in the vaccine are usually not the same ones that cause cutaneous warts.
    posted by The Elusive Architeuthis at 11:50 AM on July 1, 2016


    My stubborn plantar warts were totally resistant to home treatments but responded to more vigorous dermatologist and podiatrist treatments. For me they ended up having success switching treatments back and forth, so freezing, then canthacur, etc, which worked better than just sticking with one for whatever reason.

    I was planning to get the hpv vaccine also but the warts died before I got around to it.

    So I vote for finding a doctor who takes it seriously and is willing to experiment a bit.
    posted by Dip Flash at 12:16 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


    Had one for years. Did a lot of what you describe...though not the Lourdes water. Would have though if I had thought of it. What finally worked for me was nail polish. Kept applying it and then would peel it off occasionally. And then reapply. Took a few months but it worked. This is like the duct tape treatment only a lot easier.
    I must also mention that I also kind of relaxed about it after years of being upset. I didn't check it everyday...
    posted by shibori at 1:02 PM on July 1, 2016


    I had a plantars wart that didn't really hurt, so I mostly ignored it, other than picking at it occasionally. And it spread, and spread, and spread. And then it spread to my toes. And then one day, after years, I looked it and sort of freaked out, because it was like this huge gaping hollow in my foot by that point, and it was out of control.

    I went to the store and bought boatloads of the Dr. Scholls Salicylic acid patches. I put on dozens of those suckers. I mean, far more than I can imagine anyone would have recommended, I basically wore them like a sock on that section of my foot for a month.

    They were worth every penny, my foot completely cleared up. I suspect this is similar to the duofilm treatment described above, so, go see a podiatrist!
    posted by instead of three wishes at 1:19 PM on July 1, 2016


    I have gotten the banana peel trick to work. Here's how:
    - Organic banana peel
    - Bandaid
    - Put banana peel inside against the wart, and leave it for 2-3 days at a time, for at least 3 weeks

    Banana peels eats away at the wart, when you see the inside bits go really dark and look dead take the banana peel away and the warts disappears
    posted by zia at 1:39 PM on July 1, 2016


    Best answer: Wart viruses are specific to skin cells, and in fact foot warts tend not to affect non-foot skin, much less lungs. Lung warts are not a thing, otherwise we'd all have lung warts.
    posted by Ausamor at 1:43 PM on July 1, 2016 [7 favorites]


    I had a wart on the bottom of my foot for FIVE years. I tried freezing with dry ice (youch!!), wart remover liquid, wart remover pads, duct tape, and, on desperate days, hacking away at it with nail clippers. I FINALLY got rid of it with apple cider vinegar after doing a lot of research on it and reading about other peoples trials.

    Here's what worked for me:

    --At the end of the day, before bedtime, I soaked my foot for about 20 minutes in a 50/50 mixture of warm water and apple cider vinegar.

    --Then I took a pumice stone and rubbed away until all the black spots were gone and the wart was smooth.

    --After I dried my foot, I took a bit of a cotton ball soaked in straight ACV, covered the whole wart area, and secured it with a band-aid. I kept it on overnight and in the morning took it off and just had a band-aid on throughout the day (much more comfortable for walking).

    I did that ritual for a couple weeks and it was totally gone within a month! There's a small bit of hard scar tissue in the area (I really butchered it a few times before I started the ACV regimen), but it has not returned since. *knock wood*
    posted by E3 at 3:55 PM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


    I had a colony of plantar warts on my foot that sounds much like yours. I went to a dermatologist, who cheerfully told me that it was, hands down, the biggest batch of warts he'd ever seen. It took something like four or five visits, spaced over several months, but he was able to get rid of the whole nasty mess with cantharidin. I won't lie -- it hurt like a muthafluffa, and I had to pretend that I'd twisted my ankle every time because I limped and winced with pain for days after each treatment, but they are gone and they've never come back. YMMV.
    posted by pleasant_confusion at 5:18 PM on July 1, 2016


    Completely anecdotal of course, but I had a plantar wart for over a decade. It was rarely as painful as yours, mostly just annoying. Tried freezing - didn't work. Tried topical applications occasionally over the years, both prescription and over-the-counter - never worked. Went barefoot on a day-long canoe trip on a small, shallow river which included several intermittent hours of walking on a sandy river bottom and messing around on small beaches so my foot never really dried out. The wart felt a bit weird when I got home and when I looked at it, there was only a scrubbed out cavity in the bottom of my foot where the wart had been. Soak and sand had evidently done for it. I filled the hole with a commercial wart remover liquid a few times over the next couple days to make sure the thing was completely eradicated. It healed over and the wart never reappeared.
    posted by ClingClang at 6:53 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


    I had a mosaic plantar wart for years and years, and what got rid of it finally was a combination of freezing with liquid nitrogen and cutting it away, several times, at the doctors office.
    posted by leahwrenn at 7:52 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


    We did the rounds with All The Wart Treatments and they failed. What worked was about six weeks of high doses of vitamin a and vitamin e, which was a modification of something on a list of wart treatments someone gave me.

    I don't recall the exact dosages. It was like 100,000 to 160,000 units of one of them. We are talking handfuls of pills every single day for six weeks. This did fix it, after repeated freezing and All The Weird Ass Alternative Remedies failed and failed and failed for years.

    Best of luck.
    posted by Michele in California at 1:12 PM on July 2, 2016 [1 favorite]


    I too had a years long battle that finally worked after a broke down crying about the pain and how long the treatment was taking. Then the mean doctor at the wart clinic suddenly had more instructions and options that before. He basically acted surprised I was so upset or would want the treatment to be over sooner. Sure I love coming in for a painful treatment once a week - it's the highlight of my week! (sarc)

    I switched from freezing - which blistered much larger than the actual wart - to a paint on thing. I got that topical painted treatment once a week. After crying elicited more options, I also knew to speed up the process by using Duoplant every night for five days following my appointment, covering it in duct tape every time I had treatment (I have sweaty feet and this was necessary regardless. Then, I would remove the duct tape the day before my next appointment and allow the wart to dry out and no treatment- this reduced the pain and allowed the doctor to see the difference between my soft dying skin and the hard dying wart.
    posted by Gor-ella at 9:13 AM on July 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


    Of course, you could use the method my partner used for ten years for a wart that covered the bottom his entire big toe. Nothing, it fell off on it's own. Patience is a virtue!
    posted by Gor-ella at 9:15 AM on July 4, 2016


    > six weeks of high doses of vitamin a and vitamin e

    Vitamin A toxicity symptoms include "loss of skin" and high doses of vitamin E can cause skin inflammation. So, theoretically, megadoses might do something to shift a wart -- while doing a whole slew of terrible things to your body. Neither are vitamins that you harmlessly pee out if you OD on them. Vitamin A overdose is a notoriously bad idea. "Avoid taking vitamin A in high doses, due to increased risk of toxicity and death." The death part would put an end to the wart hassle, but...
    posted by kmennie at 6:17 PM on July 7, 2016 [1 favorite]


    When I had a wart on the bottom of my foot, I didn't have any luck until my mom got cheap insoles for my shoes and cut a hole where the wart was so it could grow "out" and there was more surface area to apply the salicylic acid. We then used a straight razor to remove dead tissue. It still took a while, but it got less painful pretty quickly (maybe just because there wasn't as much pressure on it) and eventually one day while trimming the whole colony popped out leaving a small hole in my foot.
    posted by ghost phoneme at 7:42 AM on July 17, 2016


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