Duct tape beat out ten other wart treatments for cost and effectiveness, so why isn’t it standard practice? 

One of the “unusual, innovative, and long-forgotten remedies” noted in a dermatology journal article was the use of duct tape to cure warts. It was finally put to the test. There are all sorts of conventional therapies, from acid to cryosurgery to lasers, but most are “expensive, painful, or labor intensive,” whereas the simple application of duct tape is none of those and may even be more effective than trying to freeze off the warts. 

As I discuss in my video Can You Really Remove Warts with Duct Tape?, some doctors lauded the study, noting they had been using duct tape as a “painless, yet effective, therapy for several decades,” instead of “surgery and other destructive therapies.” Said one physician, “Sometimes, when I’ve mentioned this type of therapeutic option to a patient, they will look at me as if I’ve lost my mind! When the treatment works, however, they appreciate the wisdom of my advice and my ‘minimal discomfort and fuss’ philosophy.”

Other doctors were not so amused. After spending money on all sorts of fancy equipment, along comes duct tape? Studies like that “could damage the reputation of cryosurgery,” wrote one physician, who also complained that the ten-second application of liquid nitrogen used in the study was too short, so it was an unfair comparison. And, evidently, you really have to get in there and freeze until there is a blistering reaction. It’s painful, but too bad. The doctor even joked and made light of a poor child who, before each freezing treatment session, vomited out of fear of the pain! 

Did he have a point, though, about the ten seconds? In the trial comparing duct tape to cryotherapy, those ten-second cryotherapy treatments worked 60 percent of the time, which is actually better than the results of most cryotherapy studies that only seemed to cure about 50 percent. In fact, typical cryotherapy for warts works so poorly that, statistically, it didn’t even beat out placebo, so all of that pain may have been for nothing, though aggressive cryotherapy does seem to work better. 

What they should have done, wrote another doctor in response to the duct tape trial, is take a scalpel to the wart and really blister it before going back a week later and trying to cut and crater it out. Maybe even go back a third time. ”If the procedure I detailed had been followed, the resolution rate would have been closer to 90%”—but at what cost? In the duct tape trial, one patient “lost his study wart in a trampoline toe-amputation accident.” (Amputation—a 100 percent effective treatment!) But, at what cost? In this study, 85 percent of the duct tape patients were cured without any pain or tissue damage, whereas aggressive cryotherapy may require lidocaine injection nerve blocks, “taking the cry out of cryotherapy.” It can also cause permanent tissue damage. As you can see below and at 2:48 in my video, you can end up with big, necrotic, frostbite lesions. In one sense, tissue damage is the whole point of freezing warts, but you can end up causing deep burns, rupturing tendons, which can cause permanent disability, or causing extensive scarring in rare cases. Just the psychological stress of having to keep going back for such a painful procedure may ironically impair our ability to fight off the wart viruses in the first place. 

So, “even if the effectiveness of duct tape occlusion is shown to be merely equivalent to that of cryotherapy,” duct tape would be better. And it was shown to be even more effective than cryotherapy; in fact, duct tape may be the most effective treatment. As you can see in the graph below and at 3:25 in my video, compared to ten other wart treatments, duct tape beat them all in terms of effectiveness and cost. It was cheaper than all but the “DN” option, with DN standing for Do Nothing. Compared to the most cost-effective prescription treatments available, over-the-counter duct tape is ten times cheaper. “It is an unusual and welcome event in health care when a common ailment is proven equally amenable to an inexpensive, tolerable, and safe alternative therapy.” 

Hold on. If you look at the latest Cochrane review, which many consider to be the gold standard of evidence-based reviews, it acknowledges that cryotherapy “is less convenient, more painful, and also more expensive,” but despite being excited about the effectiveness of duct tape in an earlier review, in two subsequent studies, duct tape seemed to totally flop. So, should we give up on duct tape for warts, or is there another side of the story? You can find out the thrilling conclusion in Which Type of Duct Tape Is Best for Wart Removal?, the next and final video in this three-part series. 

This is the second video in my three-part series. If you missed the first video, check out Duct Tape and Wart Removal. 

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/z32qEdU
via IFTTT

Duct tape beat out cryotherapy (freezing) for treating warts in a randomized, controlled, head-to-head trial. 

When I was reviewing “The Science Behind Common Over-the-Counter Remedies Used in Dermatology,” such as tea tree oil for acne or nail fungus, I was surprised to see a section on duct tape on the same page. Duct tape? The only time I remember seeing duct tape used in a medical study was for identifying the gases responsible for the odor of human farts. That study involved a “collection system” comprised of “gas tight pantaloons” sealed to the skin with duct tape to assess the wind-breaking ability of a cushion called the Toot Trapper. 

In this case, the dermatology journal was talking about warts. As I discuss in my video Duct Tape and Wart Removal, “Duct tape brings out our inventive, slightly kooky side…Given this versatility, it wasn’t so surprising a few years ago when a group of doctors…reported that duct tape could get rid of warts.” As I noted in my previous video on warts, Benefits of Tea Tree Oil for Warts and Cold Sores, all sorts of strange things are purported to cure warts—because most warts go away on their own. Researchers followed a thousand kids for two years, and two-thirds of their warts disappeared without doing a thing. So, maybe we should just leave them alone, “although…there are cases which may warrant treatment…” Otherwise, we can just let our own body take care of them. 

Warts are caused by wart viruses, so spontaneous wart disappearance is thought to be an immune response where our body finally wakes up and takes notice. This assumption is based on studies where foreign proteins were injected into the wart itself. In one such study, researchers injected a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine directly into the wart, which, compared to placebo, appeared to accelerate the immune clearance process. The problem is that injections hurt, of course, and 30 percent of the kids who got their warts injected with the vaccine suffered a flu-like syndrome. Yikes. Okay, scratch that. What else can we do? 

Within a few months, any placebo treatment will work in about a quarter of the cases, so it wouldn’t mean much if you put duct tape on 100 warts and 23 went away. The traditional medical therapies of acid treatments and freezing treatments bump up the cure rate to about 50 percent, so, if you were really serious about testing the efficacy of duct tape, you would pit it head-to-head against one of those two treatments, which is exactly what researchers did in “The Efficacy of Duct Tape vs Cryotherapy in the Treatment of Verruca Vulgaris (the Common Wart).” (Cryotherapy is one of the current treatments of choice for many pediatricians.) 

“Objective: To determine if application of duct tape is as effective as cryotherapy in the treatment of common warts.” Patients were randomized to receive either liquid nitrogen applied to each wart or “duct tape occlusion (applied directly to the wart).” When I heard about treating warts with duct tape, I had an image where duct tape was used to try to rip off the warts, but that wasn’t the case. A little circle of duct tape was applied to the wart every week or so.  

Although there had been a few anecdotal reports of using tape, no prospective, randomized, controlled trial had been performed until this study. Researchers found that the duct tape “is not only equal to but exceeds the efficacy of cryotherapy in the treatment of the common wart.” Cryotherapy worked in 60 percent of the cases, but 85 percent of the duct-taped patients were cured. The researchers concluded: “Duct tape occlusion therapy was significantly more effective than cryotherapy for treatment of the common wart.” More effective and with fewer side effects. “The only adverse effect observed in the duct tape group during our study was a minimal amount of local irritation and erythema,” or redness, whereas cryotherapy hurts. 

Do you want to hear the saddest thing? One young child actually vomited in fear of pain before each cryotherapy session. It was as though the poor kid was being tortured. Cryotherapy can not only cause pain, but bloody blisters that can get infected, and it can mess up your nail bed, too. 

So, duct tape: more effective, fewer side effects, and more convenient. Compare applying a little duct tape at home to making multiple clinic visits every two weeks or so. With duct tape, it’s win-win-win. 

Duct tape “can now be offered as a nonthreatening, painless, and inexpensive technique for the treatment of warts in children.” How much does a little piece of duct tape even cost? Win-win-win-win! Of course, the money you save is the money the doctor loses, and there’s no way the medical profession is going to let this go unchallenged. Further studies were performed and failed to show an effect. So, we end up with conclusions like this in the medical literature: “Is duct tape effective for treating warts?… No.” What? Is duct tape really ineffective after all, or was there some kind of critical design flaw in the follow-up studies? You can find out in my follow-up video Can You Really Remove Warts with Duct Tape?. 

This video is the first in a three-part series on duct tape for wart removal. The others are Can You Really Remove Warts with Duct Tape? and Which Type of Duct Tape Is Best for Wart Removal?. 

from NutritionFacts.org https://ift.tt/GYdmzIM
via IFTTT