Virtually everyone in the world will have a wart at some point in their life, that’s not to say that we will get them on our feet because you can get a wart just about anywhere. The warts that we are going to focus on today are sometimes called plantar warts because they typically appear on the bottom of the foot. We are going to look at what they are, what they look like, why we get them and how to get rid of them.
What are foot warts?
A foot wart is a non-cancerous skin growth found on the foot, typically on the bottom of the foot. A viral infection known as human papillomavirus, or HPV for short, can cause them.
There are a lot of people who think that the warts found on the feet are malignant, but they are not harmful at all. In about two years, a foot wart will go away without any treatment and leave nothing to show for their two-year holiday on your foot. However, during this two-year holiday, they can cause pain and irritation, they can also seem unsightly and make people feel self-conscious about their feet.
What do they look like?
A foot wart is about the size of a frozen pea, without the colouring of a frozen pea. Some warts do grow bigger than this, though. Sometimes foot warts can grow in a cluster, these are known as mosaic warts. Warts on the feet typically do not stick up out of the skin like the ones you can get on your hands. This is simply due to walking; walking flattens them.
How do you get foot warts?
Foot warts are spread from person to person. This transmission can be indirect or direct. For instance, a child can touch a ball with a hand that has a wart, another child can then pick up the ball and get a wart. Coming in direct contact with a wart can also mean that you get a wart, however, the risk of getting a foot wart from another person is very small. The people that are most at risk of getting a foot wart are people with a weakened immune system.
What are the treatments for foot warts?
As we mentioned above, foot warts will go away in their own time, but there are a few treatments that you can try at home to convince them to move along a little quicker.
Over-the-counter treatments for foot warts are available and they do work about 50% of the time. They typically work by peeling the wart off of your skin.
Doctor’s treatments can involve freezing the wart, removing it with lasers or surgery. They can also use medicine to strengthen your immune system and clear your body of the virus responsible for the wart.
You can also try the duct tape home remedy. Put a small strip of it over the wart, let it sit for 6 days, then remove the tape. Soak the wart in water then rub it with a emery board or pumice stone. Repeat this until the wart is gone.
We hope this article can help you with your foot warts. Please take a look at some of our other articles for more information on common foot conditions.