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WARNING: if you're creeped out by descriptions of DIY surgery & pictures showing tiny amounts of blood, turn back now.

 

Wasn't quite sure where to put this - while it isn't really plant-medicine related (and I'll explain why it isn't), the self-sufficiency theme seemed to fit so it ended up here.

 

When I was younger I had terrible plantar (=on the soles of your feet) warts which made walking really painful. No conventional or folk remedies worked, but I finally got rid of them by another method, which I decided to document with a small wart which appeared on my finger last year. So first here's the background: warts are virally-infected skin cells, and most wart-removal methods just work by burning off the affected area. This can be by laser, by cold-burns (liquid nitrogen), chemical burns (most OTC treatments are salicylic acid), or some kind of caustic plant sap (eg. petty spurge, a common herbal remedy for skin growths). The problems with all of these methods are (1) that they can do a lot of damage to surrounding uninfected tissue, and (2) that warts often have deep roots which don't get burnt, so they will just grow back. So armed with that understanding, and being a DIY kinda person, I tried to come up with a solution - and while slightly gruesome, this does actually work so I thought I'd share. It's based on the idea that there are several things which will fuck up virally-infected cells, so I'll just incorporate all of 'em, why not: heat, iodine, and physical removal of the tissue.

 

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For today's DIY surgery you will need:

 

bucket of hot water

iodine solution (eg. Betadine)

nail clippers &/or scalpel (or other sharp blade like razor blade)

tweezers

 

Ok so first step is to soften up the skin. If possible, soak the affected area in HOT water for ages. Like as hot as you can stand. If the wart doesn't have deep roots, this alone can be enough to kill it, if you just keep doing it - I knew a lady who would just soak her hand in a bucket of hot water while she watched TV every evening, keeping a kettle of boiling water nearby to top up the water & keep it hot, and this killed several small surface warts after a week or so of daily soaking. But if the warts are large or have deep roots, then you'll need to do more...

 

Step 2, open that sucker up. The virus is lurking in infected cells under the skin surface, and is probably protected by a layer of callus. You need to get rid of that - if you're confident with a scalpel (or a razor blade) that can work, but I just did this one with [sterilised] nail clippers (I've also heard of people just scraping the top layers of skin off with pumice or a rough scrub brush after softening the skin by soaking, but since the virus can be spread by contact this might not be a great idea). You're NOT trying to cut out the whole wart, just to remove the protective callus on the surface, so this won't be too painful. Now you can see all the roots:

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At this point you have a few options. Since the skin is broken & those infected cells are now exposed, you can apply iodine which serves the dual function of killing off any exposed cells & preventing infection. You can also just continue with the soaking-in-hot-water method, and that will keep killing off the surface wart cells too. If they're only shallow and you rinse & repeat enough, this could work. But for large areas it can be painful to expose all those raw nerve endings to scalding water, not to mention risking infection if you're doing this on a regular basis. So my preferred method is to move on to...

 

Step 3: pull them out by the roots! Warts send down roots to latch on to minor blood vessels so they'll have a direct supply of food & resources on tap. If you look closely at a wart it has a structure something like a raspberry, and each one of those little "drupes" can have deep roots. In the picture you can see a kind of cross-section of a few of these. If possible, grab these one-by-one with tweezers and pull them out. If the roots have gone into nerves or blood vessels this process can be fairly painful and bleed a lot - don't freak out, that's normal. However the virus can spread by blood, so try to keep that away from any other areas of broken skin, and clean it off quickly with betadine. After you pull out each rootlet drop a few drops of iodine into the wound to kill off any cells which might have been shed or left behind. You probably won't be able to physically pull out the entire root structure of a large wart (just like with plants, some roots will snap off or there won't be enough above-ground material to get a good grip), but if you can get most of them and drown the area in iodine, that might kill off the remaining bits. At the very least you'll make it smaller & easier to deal with next time. Once you yank out a few and see how deep they can go, you'll understand why putting a few drops of liquid nitrogen or caustic agent onto the skin surface often achieves nothing. Finish up by cleaning the area with iodine & sterilising your clippers/blades/etc so as not to spread the virus when they're next used.

 

This is the same area healing up a few days later. Turned out I had missed one tiny piece and had to wait for it to re-grow a bit so I could get a good grip with the tweezers to yank it out:

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...and a year later:

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I hear you ano. I had plantar warts on one foot when I was about 10 or 11, I used to have to get it scraped every night and then applied formalin to it. Pretty toxic stuff.

For regular warts my mum used to put chickweed sap on them and it was pretty effective.

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Thanks for posting this Anodyne, I've done a bit of DIY medical stuff myself.

This paves the way for me to post pics of my DIY circumcision I did last year.

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7 hours ago, Sallubrious said:

Thanks for posting this Anodyne, I've done a bit of DIY medical stuff myself.

 

This paves the way for me to post pics of my DIY circumcision I did last year.

:blink::o

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Nice one Sally, love the can-do attitude around here. :)

 

If that goes down well we can move on to the parallel series I've been working on: "When home surgery goes wrong", where I detail my other attempts at DIY.

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I can't really say my DIY job "went wrong" per se

But I certainly could have done a much better job if I was sober enough to realise the stanley knife had a spare blade inside it that was actually sharp before I began.

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I've killed one a while back just by pushing hawthorn throrns through them, the hawthorn always makes for a "festy" splinter/wound and the body always gives a strong response to them . Another I "rubbed out" with good old solvol soap over a few sessions.

 

I've read of some acacia thorns and dry sharp phyllode tips being used in a similar impaling fashion....

 

nice read Ano:wink: once shit got surgical I was captivated...lol:lol:

 

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Sorry about that Anodyne, I just get in a twisted mood sometimes and this place is the perfect outlet.

Getting back on topic.

They're a curious little entity warts, they are a blood borne condition but they seem to have preferred locations to reveal themselves. Even though our blood circulates through our entire being the outside appearance of the warts themselves is much more likely to occur on hands, feet, elbows or knees. I wonder why that is the case. Maybe cell walls damaged from pressure helps the virus get a foothold before it transforms into the wart structure ???

I've had a few warts. One was on my ankle and got chopped off by the crank on my dragster. Yes it came with a sissy bar which was fitted standard and also had those sharp fucking 3 piece cranks held on with cotter pins. That wart just got whisked away into into the aether and I never saw or heard from it again.

The other one was on my index finger on my dominant hand. It drove me nuts because it was just off center from the main contact point on my fingertip & whenever I picked anything up & it would get squashed on an angle & really piss me off.

I used wart kill on that one. At first the wart just went white, but after a few days it started go a gnarly brown colour. Then after about ten days the whole area started swell up and it looked like a flesh eating skin volcano that was about to erupt. It was getting pretty painful and I was seriously thinking I should see a quack and stop using the wart kill, but by chance I showed a guy who was working with me at the time (a true expert in the field, he was a Czechoslovakian Engineer/mechanic who could barely speak English) and he said
"yes it is working your body will soon eject the wart"

Sure enough the wart fell fell off the next day and left a huge crater almost right down to the bone.

It healed very fast and never grew back. I've never had problems with warts since then - almost 30 years.

I don't even know what was in the wart kill in those days, it came in a little glass bottle (the same type rush used to come in) and it had a plastic stick attached to the underside of the lid that was used as an applicator.

Edited by Sallubrious
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Cool. For the really recalcitrant ones it sometimes seems like nothing short of a nuke will do it...but I had one a while back on my foot and one of the treatments I tried was asthma plant (Euphorbia hirta) sap. Although in the end I think it was the multiple applications of salicylic acid and freezing and debriding over a period of months that eventually got it...but who's to say the plant didn't have an effect...apparently Euphorbia peplus (petty spurge) is supposed to be good/maybe better too. Just didn't have any of the former growing near me, and there was never quite enough sap from the asthma plants to treat often.

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Celandine (Greater) is the traditional method.

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A friend of mine started eating turkey tail mushrooms and he said his warts fell off within a couple of weeks!

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I've killed one a while back just by pushing hawthorn throrns through them, the hawthorn always makes for a "festy" splinter/wound and the body always gives a strong response to them . Another I "rubbed out" with good old solvol soap over a few sessions.

 

 

Waterboy rubbed one out

 

With solvol

 

Tough sumbitch!

 

I demand more wart stories from everyone

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I used to get little micro-fuckers on my knuckles and the tips of my fingers sometimes (almost never now though) and would burn them out with a lit incense stick or a soldering iron.
Sounds a bit horrific, but if it is good and hot you can kill the nerve endings pretty fast and get fairly deep without too much discomfort.

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http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82708000/jpg/_82708605_88323765-20b8-4fea-9685-305f40bd9103.jpg

 

Once I was removing a wart but decided to take out my appendix while I was in there anyway

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bwahaha!

 

Those "other DIY attempts" I mentioned included suturing, removing a tooth, skin grafting, relocating dislocated limbs, and setting a bone (all on myself). But when it came to appendicitis I pussied out and let surgeons do it. I'm so ashamed to show my face in the self-sufficiency crowd now.:blush:

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I had one that wrapped a soaked cotton wool with nail polish remover for maybe one month, that worked quite easily.

I do believe it was the acetone.

 

Edited by manu

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I had a bunch on one hand a few years ago. Tried and tried with the store bought salicylic acid crap, but they always came back. My doctor told me to try duck tape. I put duck tape on my hand every night for two or three weeks and they just shrank up and disappeared. Never came back. Not nearly as gruesome as some of your stories, but if you want something painless that works...

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MMS (sodium chorite) & 50% citric acid.   oxidizes the fk out of them.   

helps to have nascent iodine in your diet too. 

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I did a bit of DIY surgery today

 

Last week I went to get something in the shed and scraped my thumbnail on an old 2*4 and a splinter slipped straight down the side of the nail. It hurt a bit but I actually got a bit of laugh out the irony. Compared to the pain my back had been giving me for last month it was actually enjoyable. I was half tempted to leave it in as a distraction. It was a half rotten piece of timber that had had soil contact for years so I didn't hold that thought for more than about two or three minutes.

 

The end was just poking out beyond my nail so I was lucky enough to be able grab it with a pair needle nose pliers and pull it back out, The fucking was longer than thumbnail it slipped under. I gave the wound a quick clean with peroxide and just forgot about it.

 

It was sore and tender for a few days (I couldn't use a cigarette lighter with that hand for a few days, I fell of the wagon with the smokes after my back trouble I stopped giving a fuck everything there for a while ) and then last night it started hurting a bit & I noticed it was getting pretty swollen. So I ran my other thumbnail along the swollen area and a heap of pus came out - excellent.

 

So I opened up a fresh hypodermic needle and poked/sliced around into the quick at the side of my nail and found several more splinters were still in there. Those big arse needles from the produce supply store are the ants pants for slicing and dicing yourself when you have something stuck under your skin that you want out, much sharper than an ordinary needle and you don't have to be as brave as you do to go in with a scalpel, you can incise an area almost painlessly just by poking holes all around it and then use it to cut and rip anything still hanging on.  I cleaned it up with peroxide and now (8 hours later) it just looks like a bit of skin is gone from the side of the nail and most of the swelling and redness is gone. Looks like I had a win there.

 

I've had the flu for the last week and it seems I've ruptured and eardrum as consequence of an ear infection that came with it, For the first time in years I'll admit that I probably should see a quack but I can't get to a doctor, the mobile dial a quacks won't come to me (as soon as they find out you're a middle aged man you get dropped right down the priority list)  and I'm sure as fuck not going to hospital. So I've decided to DIY that too - peroxide in the ear until all the blood and shit seems to clear up and then mega dose vitamin C.

 

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just thought id leave this here... this is what i use, you can get them at bunnings. They are great for precision also emla cream is ok for numbing but if you can get lignocaine its even better...

 Happy hacking everyone!     41FT+u3UEFL._SL256_.jpg

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After reading this I knew I had to share this to help some peeps out. vasectomy.thumb.jpg.acc4e83806cfc5c3dcad6140244013f3.jpg

 

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vasectomy.thumb.jpg.acc4e83806cfc5c3dcad6140244013f3.jpg

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