"Can You Really Remove Warts with Duct Tape?"
One of the unusual, innovative, and long-forgotten remedies noted
in this dermatology journal was the use of duct tape to cure warts,
finally put to the test.
There's all sorts of conventional therapies
from acid to cryosurgery to lasers, but most of these
are expensive, or painful, or both.
Whereas the simple application of duct tape is neither—
and may even be more effective than trying to freeze the warts off.
Some doctors lauded the study, noting they had been using
duct tape for decades as a painless yet effective treatment,
as opposed to surgery and other destructive therapies.
The only downside being your patients may think you're off your rocker,
but hey, when it works, they appreciate your wise choice to minimize discomfort.
Other doctors were not so amused. Here they are spending money
on all this fancy equipment and then along comes duct tape?
Studies like that "could damage the reputation of cryosurgery,"
complaining that the 10-second application of liquid nitrogen
they used in the study was too short, so it was an unfair comparison.
And evidently you really have to get in there and freeze
until they get a blistering reaction. And yes, it hurts but too bad,
even making light of the poor child who vomited out of fear of the pain
prior to each freezing by making some joke about it.
Did they have a point, though, about the 10 seconds? Well, in the duct tape
versus cryotherapy trial those 10-second cryotherapy treatments
worked 60% of the time, which is actually better than the results
of most cryotherapy studies that only seemed to cure about 50%.
In fact, the typical cryotherapy for warts works so poorly that
statistically it didn't even beat out placebo, so all that pain may be
for nothing, though aggressive cryotherapy does seem to work better.
See, what they should have done, wrote another doctor in response
to the duct tape trial, is take a scalpel to it and then really blister it up,
and then you go back a week later and try to cut and crater it out, and then
maybe go back a third time, bragging that they can get closer to a 90% cure rate.
Yeah, but at what cost?
In the duct tape trial one patient lost his study wart
in a trampoline toe-amputation accident.
Hey, there's a treatment that works, 100% effective: amputation!
But at what cost?
Eighty-five percent of the duct tape patients were cured with no pain
or tissue damage, whereas aggressive cryotherapy may require lidocaine
injection, nerve blocks, to take the "cry out of cryotherapy"
and can cause permanent tissue damage.
You can end up with these big necrotic frostbite lesions.
I mean in one sense tissue damage is the whole point of freezing warts,
but you can end up causing these deep burns or end up rupturing tendons,
which can cause permanent disability or cause extensive scarring in rare cases.
Just the psychological stress of having to keep going back
for this painful procedure may ironically impair our ability
to fight off the wart viruses in the first place.
And so even if the effectiveness of duct tape is shown to be merely equivalent
to that of cryotherapy, it would be better; and it was shown to be
even more effective, in fact maybe most effective.
Compared to 10 other wart treatments, duct tape beat out them all
in terms of effectiveness, and also in terms of cost—
cheaper than all but the DN option, which stands for Do Nothing.
Compared to the most cost-effective prescription treatments available,
OTC duct tape, meaning over-the-counter duct tape, is 10 times cheaper.
It's an unusual and welcome event in health care when a common ailment
is proven equally amenable to an inexpensive, tolerable,
and safe alternative therapy. But wait.
If you look at the latest Cochrane review, which is like
the gold-standard of evidence-based reviews, they acknowledge that
cryotherapy is less convenient, more painful, more expensive.
But while in the earlier review they did get excited about the effectiveness
of duct tape, in two subsequent studies duct tape seemed to totally flop.
So should we give up on duct tape for warts
or is there another side of the story?
We'll find out in the thrilling conclusion, next.