If you happened to catch today’s “Live With Regis and Kelly” show, you may have heard “Reege” mention that a sure fire way to get rid of warts is to lick the unattractive lumps. A horrified Ripa maintained that licking warts was not a cure all… and now we know duct tape doesn’t work any better.
The the morning talk show hosts’ were referring to a new study done by Dutch researchers that found contrary to popular belief duct tape does not work any better than doing nothing to cure warts in schoolchildren. The study was conducted on 103 children aged 4 to 12 and showed the duct tape worked only slightly better than using a corn pad–a sticky cushion that does not actually touch the wart.
“After 6 weeks, the warts of 8 children (16%) in the duct tape group and the warts of 3 children (6%) in the placebo group (the placebo group used corn pads) had disappeared,” the researchers wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. They added that this difference “was not statistically significant.”
The study also found that some of the children who wore duct tape reported itching, rashes and other effects, while none of the children who wore corn pads did.
I had a nasty wart on my finger when I was in the 8th grade. Back then I learned from my grandmother (who was a registered nurse) that warts are caused by a virus in the skin, and often clear up on their own, which mine did. However, they can also be frozen off in a treatment called cryotherapy, or burned off chemically using a strong formulation of salicylic acid. But considering the pain involved with cryotherapy, and the tediousness of applying salicylic acid for a long time, it was long believed that simply applying tape would be a cheap and helpful alternative, especially in children.
This latest wart study follows in the footsteps of a similar one done in 2002 by Dr. Dean Focht of Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington. He and his colleagues reported in the same journal that using duct tape on warts worked better than cryotherapy. As a result, the idea of using duct tape to treat warts quickly was further advocated on the Internet.
However, the Dutch researchers say they stand by the results of their study and point out that Focht’s team did not actually examine their patients to determine if the warts had disappeared, but called them on the telephone to ask.
Have you ever duct taped a wart? Did it work?