After having some great success with verrucas recently I thought I'd take a look around and see if anyone had done the same, apparently not!
This is purely anecdotal and obviously not medical advice. Basically I'd had a bad verruca on the end of my 2nd toe for around 7-8 years, was joined by a couple of others on my big toe and ball of same foot around a year later, first I'd ever had at around 40 years old. I'd tried freezing a couple of times with no success at all, the one on my big toe was painful and I basically pulled it all off (it was quite deep) but as expected it returned fairly quickly. Around 3 months ago my wife saw how bad they'd gotten and we discussed seeing a Chiropodist after we'd got a family holiday out of the way...
That family holiday was for everyone to go away with my father who'd developed rapid stage prostate 4 cancer and been given a few months to live, his chemo was missed due to hospital errors thinking he had an infection and he wasted away in there for around 6 weeks, was not in a good way when we took him out the day after the longevity diagnosis. In an effort to try to slow the progress or help in any way at all we'd discussed lots of things and Ivermectin had come up. I looked into it as much as I could, what medical trials had been conducted etc as well as certain podcasters and it appeared there was some merit in there - like most medications it can't easily be obtained in the UK without prescription so working on a farm I got hold of about 6 week's worth of the much demonised "Horse paste", (there's nothing bad for humans in it!) and we'd decided to give it a go - sadly dad only just made it through the holiday and died at home a few days after, we didn't even have the chance to try it, not that we'd expected miracles, just anything that may have helped at that point.
So, as a fairly healthy 48-year-old with a curious nature I thought I'd try it on myself since I had it, I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen but I'd never had great skin and it's a recognised treatment for various ailments such as Rosacea, it actually covers quite a broad spectrum of conditions from parasitic to viral with some reported success at fungal infection too... I took around 1cm of the paste a day orally (it does not taste nice) rather than locally (it can also be used that way apparently), sometimes before food, sometimes after, mostly afternoon or early evening. I took it for 6 weeks and felt no ill effects, my skin actually did improve and mild acne/red areas around my nose/forehead are still clear around a month after I stopped taking it. The main thing I noticed, and the point of this post, was that my veruccas (starting with the one on the second toe) were diminishing after a few weeks, by week 5 they had completely gone. No trace left at all. I hadn't expected or looked for that to happen, just one day a few weeks in I realised - remembering the conversation about the chiropodist just weeks earlier, after that I kept a check on the progress and they just carried on shrinking. Could be a huge coincidence but I doubt it!
So I'm just putting my experience out there, not suggesting anyone copies what I did, I'm not a doctor, the version I took isn't what I'd have ideally taken but it's not over-the-counter here. I'm not in a position to do any clinical trials with Ivermectin but as far as I can see it's never been tried for veruccas, it is accepted for use with various conditions though and is supposed to be safer than taking Ibuprofen (in tablet form at least). I'd love for it to be an actual cure for those suffering.
