Warts

I mean warts – the actual skin growths caused by HPV.  This is a little outside of the scope of the things I usually write about (like I stick to a topic…), but it’s been bothering me.  The treatment, that is, not the wart – it’s gone, and that’s what this is about.

A few years ago one appeared near my thumb’s knuckle, just around the corner where the fingerprints start, and it bugged the hell out of me, because it was exactly in the right place to rub it with my middle finger, which for a fidgeter is a real distraction.  So I, predictably, asked my (terrific) GP about it, and he gave it a shot from his liquid nitrogen bottle and told me to use one of the over-the-counter salicylic acid-based wart removers until it was gone.  I failed at the followup – having to do it multiple-times daily was a pain in the ass, and the bottle dried up and I didn’t get around to replacing it, and the wart just stayed.  On subsequent visits to the sawbones I brought it up again, and he froze it again, and we went through this pointless cycle a few more times.  Eventually he referred me to a hand surgeon, and after waiting months for the appointment was told by the surgeon (in about 45 seconds) that it was in a spot where there was too much flexing and stretching of the skin for surgery, so he wouldn’t touch it.  And the stupid thing kept growing and I just kept it under control by snipping the top off, flush with the skin (with Snap-On‘s 710 flush cutters – my favourite for many years).

Ultimately I got tired of all this – the salicylic acid stuff didn’t work and liquid nitrogen didn’t work and hurt like hell.  So I brought up with the doc a little ancient medical history:  That I’d only once before (in my early teens) had a (plantar) wart, and that my then-GP had successfully dispatched it with a single application of fuming nitric acid.  Present doc had never heard of it, and was (and, I think, remains) skeptical, confident that time has distorted my memory and that I’m confusing nitrogen and nitric acid.  I’ve always been pretty sciency, so I reject that theory (though I do acknowledge how unreliable memory usually is).  I even contacted the clinic in my hometown where I’d had that treatment as a kid, but my records had, unfortunately, long since been purged, so I couldn’t prove it to him.  He wasn’t ready, willing, or able to supply the treatment I wanted, but I was shortly (by pure coincidence) introduced over coffee to a FOAF who worked in a local medical lab.  I explained the problem, and a couple of days later he slipped me a couple of mls of 70% nitric acid – perfect, since I only needed a little and didn’t much want to have to buy a litre of the stuff from a chemical supplier (which would only tempt me to make nitroglycerine, right?).  It wasn’t the 90%+ fuming, but it would probably do.  And it did – I applied the smallest possible drop (probably a µl) and a second drop a couple of hours later, then left it alone.  It caused a little burn, a little pain, and within a couple of weeks my thumb was all healed up, the wart gone and without recurrence to date.

What happened to this fast, cheap, effective treatment in the intervening 40 years?  You can search around the ‘net and not find a trace of it being used in modern medicine.  About the only plausible theory anyone has offered is that the recent introduction of WHMIS (Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) requirements simply made it too much of a hassle to deal with compared to liquid nitrogen, regardless of efficacy.

There’s one footnote to this story.  Before trying the nitric acid treatment, I happened to be at our vet’s office for some routine dog or cat thing.  I mentioned to her the problems I’d had with this stupid persistent wart, and she told me about having had great success using neoplasene for removing cancerous skin lesions in dogs, and gave me few mls of it.  She did say that it was a controversial (and unapproved?) treatment, and that simply acquiring it took some unusual steps.  Regardless of her endorsement, I was a little suspicious of this goo, having seen/heard a piece or two on “black salve”, a caustic paste making the rounds in “alternative” (read: quack) medicine circles that has caused a lot of people serious damage and grief (iIrc, an episode of Botched featured a woman who, quite literally, destroyed her nose overnight with this stuff.  I won’t get into further details on black salve here; you can google it yourself).  Sure enough, that’s what the vet gave me, so that tube remains sealed on my desk; I trust her regarding having had good outcomes with dogs, but I’m not using it on me.

So the question remains:  How does modern medicine “forget” a treatment as good as nitric acid for warts?  And how many others have suffered the same fate?

Dances With Holocaust Deniers

This one has been nascent for quite a few years and I really have to get started writing it down.  It may take a while to work through and get right, so if you happen to run across it, consider it a work in progress.

This starts about ten years ago.  I’d finished reading Neil Baldwin‘s “Henry Ford and the Jews:  The Mass Production of Hate“, and learning that Ford had underwritten the original translation (from Russian to English) of the notorious Czarist fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion“.  Having never read it, I figured it was time to familiarize myself with this perennial bit of anti-Semitic nonsense.  Easiest thing to do, of course, is search it out online, and for that I turned to The Pirate Bay.  Found it immediately, downloaded it, started reading it, confirmed that it was too fucking stupid for me (or anyone else) to waste any time on, and moved on to something else.  But there was something interesting in the description:  A link to “Conspiracy Central” and the invitation to come for more conspiracy theories and related entertainment.

How could I possibly turn that down?

The link took me to a forum (and attached torrent tracker) with just about every imaginable bit of crackpottery represented:  JFK assassination, perpetual motion, 9/11, dowsing and the usual paranormal buncombe, and, of course, Holocaust denial.  So I did something (for me) uncharacteristic:  I tossed in some trollbait.  I commented on an interview clip of Ernst Zundel, then in prison in Germany (and since, thankfully, having assumed ambient temperature).  It was something to the effect the he was exactly where he belonged, being sodomized by big blacks, Jews, etc.  After the predicted flareup abated, I found myself engaged with a user named “Ctrl“, who was pushing the argument – on purely technical grounds – that the extermination+disposal system at Auschwitz (the gas chambers and ovens) could not possibly function as is commonly believed.  We established our bona fides.  He was most emphatic that, though a Holocaust denier, he was not an anti-Semite, and was interested enough in the subject to have visited the camps.  And I made clear that I’m an atheist Jew, technical, skeptical, and not sympathetic toward Israel (on this site, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli sentiment blurs into some pretty raging anti-Semitism).  His argument started with the boiling point of hydrogen cyanide and how a “shower room” full of Jews couldn’t possibly raise the temperature enough for toxic levels of HCN to be liberated from the solid pellet form (as Zyklon B) introduced through the rooftop vents.  It was immediately obvious that he lacked even the most basic background in chemistry and thermodynamics (not that mine is all that great) to allow him to understand concepts like diffusion and vapour pressure.  I tried as patiently and sincerely as possible to explain, but it wasn’t taking.

Then things took a really weird turn – one that could not have been anticipated.  As I nosed around the forum, it was apparent that it was well-populated, to the tune of tens of thousands of registered users.  Then I found indications that it was based here in Calgary – and that “Ctrl” was the guy who ran it.  Suddenly, everything had changed.  This was no longer some arbitrarily distant, abstract relationship – we might actually engage personally.

So that’s when it got serious.  I told him that if he was that certain, that convinced that under those conditions people couldn’t possibly die, then he’d have no problem with undertaking an experiment:  We would set up a sealed room of agreed environmental conditions (temperature and humidity) and he would occupy it for an agreed period of time after the introduction of as close an analog to Zyklon B (HCN bound in a solid matrix e.g. diatomaceous earth) as we could obtain.  It should go without saying that I found the act of issuing this challenge very disturbing.  Would I be willing to go through with it, knowing that the outcome would almost certainly be his death?  The world can do to lose every Holocaust denier possible, and this would be a “suicide by stupidity”, but would that morally absolve me?  And what would my legal liability be?  This had become a nontrivial matter, and I sat through more than one of the subsequent online sessions with my hands shaking.

These exchanges were all taking place while the forum’s other users watched on, occasionally interjecting warnings to him like: “Mike – don’t do it – he’s a Zionist agent and he’s going to kill you!”

Ultimately, he backpedaled out of the challenge with an assortment of tepid excuses that made perfectly clear that he wasn’t really convinced enough by his own arguments.  He then switched subjects, arguing that the flammability of HCN made its use impossible in the same facility that housed the ovens – that the whole place would blow up.  Seemed to me that this claim too would be easily debunked, so I hit the MSDS and my trusty copy of the the CRC Handbook for the parametrics.  Sure enough, the concentration necessary for killing people is orders of magnitude lower than the explosive threshold, making operating both the gas chambers and crematoria in the same building way safer than using a welding torch near a car’s gas tank – something done thousands of times a day in muffler shops all over the world.  Strike two.

But while working that out from first principles, it occurred to me that I couldn’t be the first to have to debunk these blockheaded claims – there must be hundreds of Holocaust-denial-correction sites out there where these arguments had already been presented.  And a cursory search revealed that, sure enough, there are, and that these canards, along with the ones about the gas chamber doors and prussian blue, were nothing more than the Fred Leuchter playbook (which you too can find online).  If you’re not up on this stuff, Leuchter (a self-proclaimed expert in a lot of stuff he knows nothing about, and the subject of Errol Morris‘s documentary “Mr. Death“) was commissioned to write an “engineering analysis” of the Auschwitz facility by Zundel when the latter was on trial in Canada .  So I went back to the forum and told Ctrl/Mike and the rest of them that what they were doing was intellectually dishonest, and that I wasn’t going to waste any more time working through and arguing these points when everything in Leuchter’s report had already been throughly debunked by others.

And that’s about where it came to rest.  I wish I’d been able to capture the entire series of exchanges so I’d have a literal record of the whole episode, but the layout of the forum made it effectively impossible, and the site has since changed hands (though its users from back then still appear to substantially populate it) and those old posts were lost.

Coda:

Once the dust had settled a little, I invited Ctrl/Mike to get together for a beer.  I had a radio show coming up in a couple of days, so I asked him to join me at the University, and on the appointed night I brought the beer.  He was a no-show.  When I asked him why, he said he didn’t think I was serious.  I assured him that I was, and suggested we get together at The Ironwood (near where he lived in Forest Lawn), as friend and outstanding guitarist Lester Quitzau had a gig coming up.  This time he made it.

So we sat down at the bar and ordered a couple of beers.

(The rest of the story will be along soon – I’m a little tied up at the moment reverse-engineering the Alpine keyless-entry and security system Subaru used from ’99-’03.  It has problems that have really driven owners of those cars (including me) nuts for a long time and nobody has solved.)