What are some available treatments for dealing with warts?
We don't have any specific medicine that kills the wart virus. However, the wart virus can only live inside the skin cell, so if we kill the skin cell that the wart virus is dependent upon, we also kill the wart. We can do that in one fell swoop by just scooping out all the virally infected cells, but then you're left with a sore that's probably a worse problem for you than the wart, so we tend to try and do things that kill it very slowly. Since it's in the top layer of the skin, we sort of kill it one layer at a time. The most common thing that's used is something called salicylic acid, and that's available in liquid and patches that you can buy over the counter. The acid denatures the protein in the cell that the virus is living in, and it dies. A dead wart, clinically, looks to the patient just like live wart. You still see the same bump, and oftentimes patients say "Well the treatment didn't work", when really it did work, and now all you have is a piece of dead skin sitting there that looks just like the wart, but is no longer proliferating. In addition to that, other treatments used for dealing with warts are freezing, burning, lasers to kill the blood supply that feeds the wart, and newer topical treatments that are aimed at stimulating the body's immune system to get rid of warts a little bit faster.
