Fact or fiction: Can duct tape kill your warts?

Before turning to painful and expensive treatments for warts, health experts say one solution could lie in a simple household item: duct tape.\nDr. Charles Lewis, a faculty member in IU’s department of dermatology, said duct tape is an effective way to remove warts.\n“Yes, duct tape can heal warts, and we often recommend it for children as it is much less painful than most other treatments,” he said.\nOther common treatments for warts include cryotherapy, which Lewis said, “essentially freezes the skin through the use of liquid nitrogen.”\nKeratolysis, the removal of dead skin cells through the use of salicylic acid, and laser treatments are available as well. There are also numerous over-the-counter options, but none as cheap and simple as the duct tape remedy. Most over-the-counter options require multiple applications daily and can cost upwards of $24 with no guarantee of complete removal of the wart, said Hugh Jessop, director of the IU Health Center.\nJessop said to begin the process, a person should leave the duct tape on the wart for six days, completely sealing the wart.\n“At the end of the six days, the top layer of the wart will be softer and able to be sanded away with something similar an emery board,” he said. “This process should be repeated over a period of a couple months and has shown to be more effective than the process of cryotherapy.”\nJessop and Lewis said it is important to note that something that looks like a wart might actually be a growth of a much more serious nature. \n“The caution I would throw out here is knowing that it is in fact a wart,” Jessop said. “There are too many other things that look similar to warts, for instance caratosis, which is a preliminary stage of skin cancer.”\nThough health experts recommended using duct tape for the procedure, Patti Sack, a public relations representative for Duck Brand Duct Tape, said the company does not support the use of duct tape for wart removal because it has not been tested by the FDA.