Plantar warts can become a very serious problem if they are left untreated. Most patients tend to ignore the existence of a single plantar wart, they don’t realise that they can spread and literally infect the whole bottom of the foot hence the name plantar warts.
are caused by the HPV virus there are many different strains of this virus which result in many different presentations of plantar warts. Some are quite painful and patients will often seek advice very early as the pain becomes very annoying to them, fortunately these are often the easiest to treat if they are treated properly. Other plantar warts cause absolutely no pain whatsoever unfortunately this type of plantar wart is often a mosaic wart. These can be the worst wart to have as they spread slowly but surely and because of the lack of pain most patients never bother to have them checked out. Mosaic warts establish satellite plantar warts (a wart around the original wart) and these just get bigger and bigger and eventually coalesce to form a single lesion which can be quite large in size. Treatment of these can be very difficult and can be painful for the patient simply due to the large amount of tissue that is involved. We have found that freezing with liquid nitrogen is a very in efficient way to treat plantar warts, it is also painful to the patient and often requires multiple treatments (which often don’t work). We have been dealing with plantar warts for over twenty years and now treat most of them with laser, we find that this causes minimal pain to the patient and results in a very high success rate in resolving plantar warts.
