Warts / Plantar Warts / Verrucae
by Stephanie on August 6, 2010
How did I get this wart?
Warts are a living, fleshy lump that grows on the skin. They are caused by a viral infection of the surface of the skin and are fairly contagious. If you have a wart on your foot, you have stepped on a viral particle that has dropped off another wartand stayed alive long enough to be picked up by you. Swimming pools and public showers often get blamed for spreading warts. This is probably reasonably accurate because wart particles live a lot longer when dropped into a damp area and the skin is much more receptive to being infected when it is puffed up and waterlogged. Also, we like to think that we must have caught this unpleasant thing from a stranger. Consider though, who is most likely to put their foot where yours has been, immediately after you, in a wet place? The number one person most at risk from getting a wart from you, is you. We rarely see people with a single wart. Often there is the bigger, oldest wart and several other smaller ones of varying ages. The next most at risk is family or others who share the wet areasof your home.
What is a plantar wart and why do they hurt so much?
The term plantar means the sole of the foot. It isn t a special kind of wart, just a bad place to get one. If you have a wart or a mole on your forearm, it will sit out of the skin. On the weight bearing areas of the foot though, the lump is pressed into the skin to sit flush. In normal skin, the nerves that report pain and other sensations back to your brain are laid out in such a way that they are protected. In a wart, the arrangement of cells in the surface of the skin is disorderly and results in the nerve strands being stepped on which can be very painful.
How are warts treated ?
Because warts are composed of a mutation of your own skin, anything that we do to the wart, we do to you. The blood vessels that run into a wart are your blood vessels and the nerves are your nerves. Unfortunately, this means that there is no completely painless way to treat the problem. It is very important to treat the wart as soon as you notice it. Warts grow bigger over time and delaying treatment will usually mean a more painful job. To be rid of a wart, it must be all killed. The particle that initially infected you would have been one million times smaller than a drop of water and if anything even this size is left behind, the wart will regrow.