Plantar warts are growths that usually occur on the soles of your feet, although they can also appear on the top. Unlike other types of warts, these are often flat because the constant pressure of walking causes them to grow inwards. While they can be uncomfortable and sometimes ugly, plantar warts aren’t harmful.
What Causes Plantar Warts?
Plantar warts are caused when a type of human papillomavirus (HPV) enters the body through cuts or lesions in the skin. This happens when you come in contact with a wart or a surface that has the virus on it.
How Can You Tell If You Have A Plantar Wart?
Plantar warts are often mistaken for callouses, but it’s easy to tell the difference when you know what to look for. Callouses are areas of the skin that have hardened, so the lines of the skin continue throughout. Warts, on the other hand, interrupt skins lines.
Furthermore, warts will often have black dots or “seeds,” which is their blood supply. Callouses have no blood supply and are the same colour as the rest of your skin.
Preventing Plantar Warts
Here’s how to reduce your risk of developing a plantar wart:
• Avoid walking barefoot in public places. This is especially important in warm or damp environments like locker rooms and on swimming pool decks, where the HPV virus thrives.
• Keep your feet clean and dry and change your shoes and socks daily.
• Avoid contact with warts. This include your own, because they can easily spread from feet to hands.
How They’re Treated
If you don’t want to wait or if your wart is causing discomfort, there are treatments available. Some removal options are painful or take a long time to work, but laser wart removal is a quick and effective treatment method.
The podiatrist at Dalhousie Station Foot Clinic is one of the few in Calgary to use a pulsed dye laser (PDL) to treat plantar warts. For this procedure, your foot doctor will apply a local anesthetic and use the PDL to burn away the wart tissue, leaving only healthy skin behind. This treatment is fast and relatively pain free.
A Foot Specialist Serving Calgary
If you have a plantar wart that’s causing you pain, visit our foot doctor for laser wart removal. Call us today to make an appointment.