While kids are most likely to experience them, warts can develop on anyone, at any age and on any part of the body. They come in all shapes and sizes and can be categorized as common warts, plantar warts, filiform warts or flat warts. Warts typically don’t pose a health threat, and most are not even painful. Still, they can be bothersome to deal with, and they certainly don’t add any aesthetic benefit. This is why many patients (kids and adults) try to treat their wart to make it go away.
The problem with wart treatment at home is that it can be frustrating. While some warts just don’t seem to disappear at all, others go away only to come back a month later. Why are warts so difficult to remove?
How Warts Form
Warts are caused by a virus, specifically HPV. Some patients with lowered immune systems can’t fight off the virus or recognize it in order to naturally attack the area of concern. In addition, warts are highly contagious. If you touch a towel, surface, or anything else someone with a wart has used, you can pick up HPV. This is why kids are especially susceptible, since they tend to bite their fingernails, pick at hangnails and skip washing their hands.
Warts can grow for months and even years! You may not even know you have a wart developing at first. This makes it easier to spread and many people don’t attempt to treat it until it is in a more advanced stage. Warts can be nestled in thick, warm skin. This is an ideal environment for warts, but one that makes them more difficult to treat. When using topical medicine (or salicylic acid) to remove a wart, the medicine may not fully reach the actual wart and can irritate the healthy skin around it.
Letting a Dermatologist Treat Your Wart
Have you given up trying to make your warts go away? Perhaps you’ve spent a large sum of money on over-the-counter gels, pads and lacquers, only to find that your wart won’t go away or comes right back. You are not alone. In fact, this is very common and a primary reason why patients seek a skin care specialist (dermatologist) to treat their wart.
At Olansky Dermatology, you’ll have a menu of proven options to treat your warts. One of our physicians will recommend a treatment option that best suits your needs, which can largely depend on the type of wart and where the wart is on your body. Our practice offers the following ways to eliminate unsightly warts:
- Prescription Medicine
- Cryosurgery (liquid nitrogen)
- Surgical Excision
Ready to take care of that wart for good? Turn to the experts who understand skin as well as the conditions that can make your skin uncomfortable and unattractive. Schedule your wart removal in Atlanta today!
