This post is part of our Home Remedy Handbook, a tour of the landscape of home remedies from the iffy to the doctor-approved. Read more here.
Warts, especially on the hands, often spring up out of nowhere. You have this strange, crusty lump on your skin—or, more often, your child’s—and now what? They don’t come off easily, since they’re embedded in the skin. Fortunately, home treatments can be as effective as those you get in the doctor’s office.
What causes warts?
Warts are caused by a virus, specifically the human papillomavirus. There are many types of this virus, some of which can cause cervical cancer, and cancers of the throat, penis, and anus. That’s why we have a vaccine against it. But some types of HPV just cause warts on the skin.
This means, importantly, that warts are contagious. If you cut into a wart and then use the same razor to shave, you could introduce the virus into a shaving cut. If you do have a wart, you should keep it covered with a bandage and you should wash your hands immediately after covering the wart.
When can you treat a wart at home?
Not all warts are candidates for home treatment, and not everything that looks like a wart is a wart.
The American Academy of Dermatology Association recommends seeking medical treatment for warts on the face or genitals, for warts that burn, itch, or bleed, and for warts that you suspect might be some other type of growth (such as a potential skin cancer). If you aren’t sure, get a professional’s opinion.
You also don’t want to mess around with warts if you have diabetes, because if you cut or burn the skin on your feet while you have diabetes, you could cause nerve damage. You’ll also want professional help if you have a weakened immune system. Ultimately, it’s your immune system that fights off the wart, even if you’re helping it along with home treatments.
How can you treat a wart at home?
One of the valid approaches to warts is to simply wait for it to go away. It may take a while, though: Half of warts will disappear in about a year. If you’re lucky, it may only take a few months; if you’re unlucky, maybe two years or more.
Since your immune system is what actually fights off the wart, home treatments are really just speeding up the process. The current thinking on why these treatments work is that you are irritating the skin, essentially poking the immune system and telling it to wake up and get its butt in gear. So the idea is to irritate the skin of the wart just enough to spur an immune reaction, but not so much that you hurt yourself.
Salicylic acid
Over-the-counter wart removers are the gold standard for wart treatment, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. That doesn’t mean they’re an instant cure, though. One review of the evidence found that 73% of warts resolved with six to 12 weeks of treatment with salicylic acid. By comparison, only 48% resolved in that timeframe with a placebo.
To use a salicylic acid wart remover, you want to rough up the wart (for example, by filing it with an emery board that you throw away afterward) and then apply a drop of the acid as directed on the package. Cover the wart with a bandage to avoid spreading the virus, and repeat as directed.
My daughter had a wart on her hand once, and this is exactly what the doctor recommended. At the same time, she handed us the number of a dermatologist who could try to freeze the wart off. Make the appointment, she said, which will probably be a few weeks out. Use the wart remover in the meantime. By the time the appointment rolled around, the wart was clearly not long for this world. We canceled the appointment, and pretty soon the wart fell right out.
Yes, fell. A wart isn’t just a crusty area of skin; it’s like a tiny little tumor. Old-timers will talk about a wart having a “seed” underneath, and I get where that comes from. My daughter’s hand had a little crater in it once the wart fell out, but it quickly healed and looked like her normal skin again.
Duct tape and other traditional cures
Probably the next most commonly recommended wart cure is duct tape. You can use it by itself, applying the tape to the wart and changing it daily or as needed. Or you can combine it with salicylic acid, using duct tape instead of the band-aid to cover the wart between treatments.
The idea is that the adhesive in the duct tape is just irritating enough to spur the immune system to action. Clinical trials haven’t been able to say for sure whether or not duct tape works. If you can’t get wart remover, it probably doesn’t hurt to try duct tape.
Other home remedies probably aren’t effective. Apple cider vinegar, garlic, and various medicine-cabinet products like retinol cream have been suggested as potential wart cures. There’s no reason to believe they work, but since warts can go away on their own, I’m sure there are people that have tried garlic or hypnosis and had the treatment “work,” even if it doesn’t have a clinical basis.
Finally, to pass the time while you wait for the wart to go away, you can always try some old timey cures. Probably not effective, but could be fun to do. For example, you could rub the wart with a dead cat’s tail, or ask a friend to buy your warts off you. (They can then pass the wart on to someone else in the same way.) Or fry up some bacon:
In Cheshire if you would be rid of warts you have only to rub them with a piece of bacon, cut a slit in the bark of an ash-tree, and slip the bacon under the bark. Soon the warts will disappear from your hand, only, however, to reappear in the shape of rough excrescences or knobs on the bark of the tree.
