Health encyclopaedia - Alphabetical Topic List
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Treatment of Warts
Most warts clear up without treatment, but this can take a long time (up to a year). There are treatment options available to clear up warts faster, particularly if they are painful, multiplying or making you feel unhappy. However, some types of treatment can be painful, and there is no guarantee that warts won’t come back again.
Treatment depends on where the warts are and how many there are. Options include:
- Over-the-counter treatments: A variety of creams, gels, paints and medicated plasters are available from pharmacies. Most of these contain salicylic acid as their active ingredient.
Salicylic acid and other wart treatments also destroy healthy skin so it is important to protect the skin around the wart - use petroleum jelly or a corn plaster to cover it. Apply the medication following the packet instructions, but stop the treatment if your skin becomes sore. Rub dead skin off once a week with a pumice stone or emery board. - Chemical treatments: Treatments containing chemicals such as formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, and podophyllin can be used to remove warts. These chemicals are poisonous to skin cells – they are dabbed onto warts to kill the skin cells there. You can get these treatments on prescription.
- Cryotherapy: Very cold liquid nitrogen is sprayed onto the wart to freeze and destroy the cells. A sore blister develops, followed by a scab, which falls off a week to ten days later. Treatment takes about 5-15 minutes, and can be painful, so you might need a local anaesthetic beforehand. It’s usually carried out at hospital skin clinics or at your GP surgery. Large warts sometimes need to be frozen a few times before they go.
- Surgery: The aim of surgical treatment is to completely get rid of warts. Surgery is carried out under general or local anaesthetic. Warts can be cut out of the skin (useful for a few, large warts), or the skin of the wart can be scraped off with a spoon-like instrument called a curette.
Other surgical options are laser treatment, in which the wart is destroyed using a very precise laser beam, and electrocautery, in which the wart is burnt off using an electric current.
If you have genital warts, don’t try to treat them yourself with over-the-counter medicines. Instead see your GP or GUM clinic for treatment. Genital warts can usually be removed using similar techniques to those described above. However, the method depends on how big they are and whether they are inside the body or on the skin surface.
