Hi,
I wondered if I could ask for advice about tackling a large and growing zoo of verrucae on my DSs feet and hands?
ASD DS is out of school with severe anxiety. When the first few verrucae appeared he was afraid to have them treated. He couldn't even look at an emery board without screaming and running away.
Over time the verrucae have multipled and he's got about 30 of them now on his hands and feet. The anxiety has subsided and he is calmer after home schooling for a while.
The penny has now firmly dropped with him that the verrucae are a bigger problem than the anxiety. After many different tentative treatment attempts, he's now willing to do basically anything to get them to go away. (as long as he does it himself as home.)
In recent weeks he's been painting them with silver nitrate every morning, and then debriding them (removing the hard skin) the next day with a surgical scalpel (I kid you not. This is still the boy who couldn't previously look at an emery board.)
He's also tried hard with bazuka Salicylic acid, the electric wartabator, the bazuka stuff that contains fire ant poison, Wartie Freeze, CryoIQ.
He's been very persistent with the silver nitrate and the hard skin on the warts is completely gone. The warts are so smooth that they are actually shiny.
The wartie freeze worked well on one large wart and the wart completely fell off. None of the others did though.
The CryoIQ was very good on one wart and froze it completely solid though not enough time has passed to see if it will actually die. The canister was £300 and ran out very fast so we did not buy another one.
The wartabator made one wart shrink, but after that it became too painful to use on any of the warts.
Really the wartie freeze, the silver nitrate and the debriding blade are the only things that are painless and cheap enough to keep doing. But they don't actually seem to make the blasted warts die. They are still there.
Last week two new warts appeared on his heel, after all the other ones had been on his toes. He's also getting new ones on his hands, and they have now spread to my husband's hands.
We took DS to a very good podiatrist but he is terrified to enter because of PTSD relating to surgery in infancy, which he is being actively treated for. But he can't get into the podiatrist's office.
I have been corresponding by email with the podiatrist and she said we should see the GP to ask if DS's immune system is low. She says that the treatments are really just there to make the immune system attack the warts and it's odd that DS's immune system is not doing the job.
DS is taking a multivitamin (no minerals yet) and a calcium, zinc and magnesium pill. I think he is short of iodine, and we have not yet managed to introduce other mineral supplements because he gets wild reactions to broader spectrum supplements. He has a good diet but no wheat or dairy.
He is seeing a paediatrican over zoom regularly to try to sort everything out more generally (nutrition and stress) and having therapy once a week and booked for EMDR.
I just wondered if anybody might have any ideas about how to get rid of the stupid warts? He's so fed up that he's literally willing to shove a red hot needle into them to cook them, but the podiatrist says he really shouldn't do that.
Could severe anxiety suppress his immune system and make him more susceptible to warts? He doesn't catch other bugs.
I asked the NHS GP and the GP said that warts are not infectious by skin contact so it is a coincidence that DS has so many. I have booked to see a different GP on the advice of the podiatrist.
Sorry I know this is an impossible question but just wondered if anybody had any ideas or had had this before?