Warts are very common. In fact virtually everyone will experience them at some point in their life. They are very contagious and are spread by person to person contact. And although they are painless, unless they are on the soles of your feet, their dark appearance can be felt to be unsightly. But the good news is that warts are harmless enough and normally disappear by themselves within a couple of years.
Although treatment is not needed for most warts, and the wart itself will clear up in time, some people do feel the need to remove these unsightly growths. Plus, one of the other reasons people get them treated is because treatment helps to prevent warts from spreading to other parts of your body and also to other people. There are various types of treatment, and they generally involve the physical or chemical destruction of the lesion. Medical professionals have differing treatments they can offer, and these include Keratolysis which is removal of dead surface skin cells usually using salicylic acid, blistering agents, immune system modifiers or formaldehyde.
Over-the-counter medications can remove warts. These are applied to the wart every day for several weeks. DO NOT use these medications on your face or genitals. It helps to file the wart down when damp (for example, after a bath or shower) before applying these medications. There are many options you can use to remove warts. Over the counter and going to your doctor. It is up to you on how you want to go about getting them removed.
Interestingly, placing duct tape over a wart may help it disappear. A small study had people wear duct tape for six straight days, remove it, wet and scrape the wart down using a file, and then reapply the tape the next morning. This was done until the wart disappeared, for no longer than two months. The people wearing the duct tape had as much luck getting rid of the warts as those who had warts frozen off by a doctor. This method might be worth a try if you have a painless, yet unsightly wart. If there is pain there, you may not want to try the duct tape. You may want to wait until you have gone to seen a doctor about it. Because if there is pain there, it could be infected or something else. You need to contact a doctor to be on the safe side.
So, whilst warts are very common and most people will experience them at some point in their lifetime, and they are caused by a viral infection they are generally harmless and will disappear in a couple of years. And even though warts are actually benign tumour's of the epidermis caused by a virus it is nothing to worry about. And bear in mind that warts are highly contagious, and if you do get one it has probably been transmitted from person-to-person contact.
