Should we treat warts and verrucas?

My advice to parents would be to leave warts and verrucas alone unless they are getting absolutely unmanageable, spreading over the entire surface of the foot so the child can't walk, but that's really rarely the case.

Most kids are going to get warts or verrucas or another viral skin infection called melescum. And they will all clear by themselves if left untreated. There's no such thing as somebody developing a verrucas at the age of five who has still got it at the age of 85. They always clear and they almost always clear within a year. But they do sometimes take a year and a year is average so that you get some kids who clear a wart or verrucas within a few weeks and for every one of those you'll get another one for whom it will take more than a year.

The reason is that our own immune system is divided really into two bits. One bit of the immune system deals with things like bacteria and bugs like when we get a flu or bad cold and we know they kick in pretty quickly and they clear the bug usually within a week. But there's another kind of immunity that clears things like warts and verrucas and it's much slower. And so it has to build up very gradually.

But to physically destroy a ward or verrucas, you have to use something like liquid nitrogen which is very powerful and although you try to direct it just at the wart or verruca and you try to protect the surrounding skin with a bit of Vaseline you quite often wind up damaging the surrounding skin and that's why you get that white look and they can blister and they can be very painful after treatment. And they can get infected after treatment because they can get bus in them and I don't really understand why people do bring their kids along and I don't really like it when they do to be honest because it means that we hurt them and the next time they need to come to us for some vital injection , for something important like MMR or something they start crying before they've even walked through the front door because we've hurt them and we've hurt them for something that it's not really necessary to treat.