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?