What are the best verruca treatments?
Speaker 1:
Hi. Welcome back, and this week we’re talking about verruca treatments.
Speaker 2:
Looking at some of the older treatments, you had things like salicylic acid, and cryotherapy. Things like salicylic acid and debridement tend to not work too well, looking at the research around them and from our own experience in the past. They’re not as good at trying to treat them as some of, thankfully, the newer treatments that have come out.
Definitely.
Speaker 2:
So, going to hand it over to you.
Speaker 1:
Probably, just to qualify, some of those treatments do work okay in children, because verrucas in children are different. For adults, they’re not very effective. The two most effective treatments that are out there are verruca needling and Swift, which is this machine behind us here.
Speaker 1:
verruca needling has been around a little bit longer. You do need an anesthetic to have it done, to numb your foot. We do use a hyperdermic needle, punch the area many times, and that encourages your body to resolve the problem.
Speaker 1:
Swift works slightly differently. Microwaves fired through the lesion encourages your body’s immune system to basically kick start and recognize the virus and then self resolve it.
Speaker 1:
Both very effective treatments, Swift probably slightly more than the other, but some people aren’t eligible for Swift and they can have the needling. So they’re both great options to go for if you’re considering treating your verruca.
Speaker 2:
And significantly more successful than traditional treatments.
Hi, welcome back. This week, we’ve seen a lot of verrucas in The Foot & Ankle Clinic. So today we’re just going to dispel some myths about them for you.
Okay, so number one, verrucas do not have roots. Probably the most common misconception.
Ben Haythornthwaite:
Definitely.
Lucy:
It’s a virus, the virus lives in the skin, and it probably is a certain section of skin, but there is no root, as such, to come out. It’s just about killing the virus.
Ben Haythornthwaite:
The little black dots that you see in there, they don’t have to have a little black to be a verruca. The little black dots are just little blood vessels that have been cut in half and the bloods dried in them. So that’s why you get the little black dots there. And then how easy they are to pass on.
Lucy:
Yeah, so that was number two. Number three, it’s actually quite difficult, as an adult, to pick up a verruca. You either need to have direct skin-to-skin contact with someone who has the virus, or you need to walk on a surface that someone else’s immediately just walked on a few minutes ago, and probably have a little scratch on your skin or have very, very dry skin, something like that. So it’s actually quite difficult to pick them up, which is good for if you’re worried about your family members and you do have a verruca, it’s a good piece of information to have.