Dr. Leo Krawetz of Healthy Feet Podiatry in Tampa and Brooksville removes a wart by cutting it out of the heel.
Hi, I’m Dr. Leo Krawetz of Healthy Feet Podiatry.
Today, I have a patient who has a wart on the bottom of her heel, and it’s actually mosaic wart, which means there is more than a few warts there. The mosaic warts usually grow in clusters and you can see a cluster of warts here, cluster of warts here, and a cluster there.
So what I am gonna do today is cut this out and cut a little bit of the area out around the warts basically to kill viral particles. So first, I am gonna numb it up with 1% lidocaine with epinephrine and I’m injecting under the wart area and this gets it real numb real fast. Usually this is a little bit painful but not too bad and the good thing is you don’t hear any screaming right now in the background.
The next thing I’m gonna do is cut around the area where the warts are including some of the skin that does not look infected with a wart. There reason I do that is because the viral particles are so small you can’t see with a naked eye. Now, if you have any pain up there you let me know so I am basically circumscribing around the wart and the wart itself or the viral particles only live in the skin.
There are 5 layers of skin and the wart lives in the bottom layer of skin in the stratum germinativum that is what it’s called and we are only going down to that layer so I am removing all the stuff around the wart which is good skin and viral infected tissue and you could see this is the chunk of warty particles. This is the inside, this is the stuff which is actually in the foot itself and those are millions of viral particles.
Now, in the skin itself you can see this part here is the bottom layer of the skin. As you can see, there is a little of bit of fat coming out which is a little bit deeper than where the wart is actually growing, but at times when you take this out, you get a little bit of the fat which could scar when it is a weightbearing area. So what I’m doing right now is just scraping the base to try to get any remaining particles out of there and then I am gonna cauterize the base with Lumicain so it doesn’t bleed very much afterwards. These tend to be very vascular in nature and they do bleed a lot after the procedure so we put a compression dressing on them.
This is just some Lumicain so it doesn’t bleed as much and then we put a dressing on this. It will take approximately four weeks for this to heal and we will follow up in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, we will just be putting Neosporin in the hole after cleaning this out with peroxide and soap and water. If you think you have a wart on the bottom of your foot, give a call at our office or visit us on our website at https://healthyfeetpodiatry.com. Thanks.
