Warts are essentially a viral infection of an area of your skin.  The most common type of warts are the ones that are found on the soles of your feet known as Plantar Warts.  While they mostly form on your feet and hands, warts can form on almost any part of your body.  There are thousands of different strains of wart viruses that infect the skin and live in warm, damp areas like showers or swimming pools. 

While warts viruses may live in these areas, people only contract them if they are already susceptible to that particular wart virus.  Otherwise, they are not contagious in the normal sense.  The only warts that are contagious in the normal sense, where everyone can get them, are genital warts.

Best Wart Remover

Warts can be incredibly difficult to remove.  Some warts may come and go without any treatment at all while other may stick around despite various different types of treatment.  Plantar wart removal, in particular, can be incredibly hard and the warts can be stubborn.  No one method will work all the time and what worked for you in the past with warts may not work in the present or future since there are so many different kinds of viruses out there.

If you are bothered by warts, the best thing to do is to try methods that have worked for you in the past.  If that method does not work after a month, switch to another tactic to rid yourself of the wart.

How to Remove Warts Naturally

There are many different ways to remove warts naturally and without a visit to the doctor.  One of the most popular methods is to use duct tape.  With this method you cover the wart with duct tape for a week, then remove it and soak the wart in water and scrape it the dead skin that’s covering it off with a pumice stone.  Then leave the tape off for a night and reapply as necessary.  This works because the duct tape irritates the skin around the wart, causing antibodies to build up in the area which then see the wart as the cause and the attack it.

A study at Madigan Army Medical Center completed in 2002 found that putting duct tape on warts was actually more effective than visits to the doctor for freezing.  Freezing, the favorite method of wart removal by doctors, has about a sixty percent success rate while the duct tape method succeeded eighty-five percent of the time.  Some other methods of home wart removal are:

• Garlic – Rub the wart with a peeled garlic clove daily.
• Iodine – Apply once daily
• Chalk – Rub the wart once a day with chalk to dry it out.
• Lemon Juice – Squirt lemon juice on the wart two or three times a day

There are many different over the counter solutions to warts.  When you’re buying a wart remover make sure that the active chemical in it is salicylic acid.  This is the most effective chemical in fighting wart viruses.  Most solutions with salicylic acid come in the form of either a solution you apply to the wart or a patch you put on top of it.  There are also other options out however.  Dr. Scholl’s has an over the counter wart freezing kit available for purchase online or at many drugstores.

If you warts are persistent, big, or bothersome enough, you may want to consider a doctor’s visit to have them cleared up.  Doctors usually take one of three routes when dealing with warts.  First, they will scrape the dead skin off the surface of the wart.  Then they will attempt to either burn them off, cut them out, or freeze them off.  All of the procedures are relatively painless because the wart has a large mass of dead skin built around it.

Warts can be difficult to remove.  However, there are many wart remover options to choose from.  You may be able to get rid of your wart for just the price of a tube of toothpaste, but you also may have to consider a visit to the dentist if your warts are big or bad enough.