Warts are caused by the human papillomavirus and they can occur anywhere on the body. There are 10 varieties of warts and as many as 130 varieties of papillomavirus. Many people get warts  as children (mainly simple warts) and lose them inexplicably as they approach puberty. Genital warts on the other hand are thankfully rare in children and are passed on through sexual contact between adults.

Plantar warts occur on the sole of your foot and the underside of your toes and they can be a real nuisance, they can be a type of mosaic clustered wart or a simple single wart. If you firmly press a wart anywhere on your body it would feel uncomfortable and therein lies the problem with plantar warts, everytime you stand up there is firm pressure on them.

Fortunately there are a variety of off -the- shelf products that are reasonably cheap and highly effective against plantar warts, if you or your children get them you should use these products as soon as you can because the wart can progressively get bigger and more painful if you leave them be.

There is another problem with plantar warts too, they can affect the way you walk, stand and run. This happens because you move your feet and stand in a way that removes pressure from that part of your foot so you can avoid pain. This may cause inflammation to another part of your foot sole through over use and even make you prone to twisting your ankle because of how it effects your stride.

This was all brought home to me recently when my daughter kept twisting her ankle when she played sport. A plantar wart under her right big toe that had previously been unsuccessfully treated got bigger and the bigger it got the more she turned her left ankle.

Sometimes larger warts take more than one treatment so that is what we did (always use products according to manufacturers advice) and for several weeks now she has not twisted her ankle again.

Now that you know what the secondary effects of plantar warts can be you can avoid them through promptly treating them but when you don’t know you may not be able to see the cause and effect and it can make other things worse like your ankles. It is an example of the compensatory effect in action, just like a sore knee can cause back pain and a sore shoulder can give you neck pain.

Sometimes adults can baulk at getting them “burnt off” by the doctor because burning sounds painful but this does not need to be the case. The product that I used on my daughter’s foot caused her no distress atall, it was a cold spray applied with a cotton bud, other off the shelf wart treatments come in the form of ointments that are shielded from the surrounding healthy skin by barrier dressings. The sprays seem to be more effective on larger warts but the ointments work on smaller plantar warts quite well. Warts can recur, if they do you treat then again.