Immunotherapy for Wart Removal

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Removing warts can be tricky business, and different wart removal methods and techniques are based on different approaches to the problem. Laser therapy burns the wart off, cryosurgery freezes it off, and salicylic acid kills it off, but what does immunotherapy do? Immunotherapy is a term you may not have heard of, and this article introduces the idea of immunotherapy as a method of wart removal.

What is immunotherapy?

Immune therapies are, broadly speaking, treatment methods that excite a reaction from your body’s natural defences, the immune system. Different therapies achieve this end in different ways and so there are many different types of immunotherapy, each with their own pros and cons. What they all share in common though is that they get your body to deal with infections naturally.

Which immunotherapies are used for wart removal?

Immunotherapies can be used for wart removal and will involve injecting something into the wart itself which attracts the attention of your immune system. The immune system begins attacking both the injected substance and the wart as a whole, resulting in the treatment of the condition. Fungal agents like Candida can be used as immunotherapies, and so can substances called antigens, which are produced by the body in response to infections. Antigens are very specific, so need to be made in response to a fungus like Trichophyton, which is why Trichophyton antigens are often used for immunotherapy

Advantages and disadvantages of immunotherapy

The major advantage of immunotherapy is that it primes your own body to defend itself, keeping the risk of a recurring human papillomavirus (the virus that causes the infection) low because your body learns to defend against it. Although there can often be inflammation around the injected warts, there is also no irritant applied to the skin, meaning that scarring is kept minimal and your skin isn’t irritated by an abrasive substance.

The disadvantages of the therapy are that firstly it can’t be given to people suffering from immune deficiencies. Secondly there is always a chance that if a fungus like Candida is injected, a second condition arises as a consequence of the Candida. For these reasons amongst others like cost, topical creams and the like are often used instead as a first line treatment.

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