Hypnosis for wart treatment

wdb said:
There has been a lot of research into it, for a long time (possibly still) it was widely believed to be an effective treatment.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hypnosis+warts
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Thanks for posting this. Here's an abstract for one of these studies (my bolding):
It was suggested to 22 subjects that their warts would disappear if they imagined them tingling for a few minutes each day. Half the subjects received the suggestion after they had been exposed to a formal hypnotic induction procedure and the remaining half (controls) received the same suggestion after they were told simply that they were to be treated by a method called “focused contemplation.” Three of the 11 hypnotic subjects and none of the 11 “focused contemplation” subjects lost their warts during the experimental period. It is suggested that the relatively greater effectiveness of the hypnotic treatment may have been due to its believed-in efficacy; that is, subjects who lost their warts strongly believed that warts could be cured by hypnosis whereas the “focused contemplation” subjects did not believe that their treatment was especially effective in curing warts.
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Would be interesting to know if there was research that debunked these studies or that scientists simply ignored it over the years because the quality was too low.
 
wdb said:
There has been a lot of research into it, for a long time (possibly still) it was widely believed to be an effective treatment.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hypnosis+warts
Click to expand...
So this nonsense has been "tried" many times, enough to span dozens of pages of search results... and someone out there is thinking: "hey, let's try that!"

The incentive system is completely broken. It's just a churn for the point of churning easy papers. Who the hell does that serve?
 
It was suggested to 22 subjects that their warts would disappear if they imagined them tingling for a few minutes each day. Half the subjects received the suggestion after they had been exposed to a formal hypnotic induction procedure and the remaining half (controls) received the same suggestion after they were told simply that they were to be treated by a method called “focused contemplation.” Three of the 11 hypnotic subjects and none of the 11 “focused contemplation” subjects lost their warts during the experimental period. It is suggested that the relatively greater effectiveness of the hypnotic treatment may have been due to its believed-in efficacy; that is, subjects who lost their warts strongly believed that warts could be cured by hypnosis whereas the “focused contemplation” subjects did not believe that their treatment was especially effective in curing warts.
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According to this article from Harvard Health, "Studies indicate that about half of warts go away on their own within a year, and two-thirds within two years..."

It's not clear from the abstract above how long the "experimental period" was, or how long each of the patients had had warts prior to "treatment," so it's conceivable that three patients from the hypnosis group simply "aged out" of their warts.
 
alktipping said:
i had a large wart on the fore finger of my left hand for nine years i ended up digging its roots out with a sowing needle over a couple of weeks not as painful as you might think as the wart was not attached to any nerves.
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Funny you say that I had one on the side of the middle knuckle of my left index finger when I was a teenager. I didn’t fancy having that Strong salycylic acid I’d had When treated at school clinic for a persistent verruca. So I never mentioned it. I dealt with it by regularly biting off the hard skin and it would very slowly grow back. Lucky it didn’t seem to want to spread or I guess I could have ended up with one on my mouth but you don’t consider such things when you’re a teenager. I think it was very minimal for a long time but then bazuka was available so I zapped it’s last manifestation with that

if only I’d have had access to some hypnosis
 
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I was told once that you could warm up your hands/feet by imagining warm blood flowing to them....
I’m ambivalent about whether this might be possible and i admit to having done this a few times when my feet have been particularly cold- but if it is, then is it possible that imagining tingling at the site of a wart might increase blood flow to the area and possibly stimulate an immune response???
 
A Commonwealth Medical Officer my work sent me to actually recommended hypnosis for my ME.

I thought that this idiocy couldn't be topped but his psychiatrist colleague told me half an hour later that my ME was caused by being abused as a child (even though I told him that I wasn't).
 
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I'm not sure if it gets rid of warts, but if you chant her name in a darkened room, I'm told that you'll see a scary ghost named "Mary Warts" looking back at you from the "other side" of a mirror.

This apparently started as a game called "Bloody Mary." Somewhere along the line, the name of the ghost got garbled into the newspaper comic page character "Mary Worth," which, by the time it reached my grade school, had apparently been further mangled into "Mary Warts."

If I can find funding, I'll gladly conduct a randomized control trial to see if such chanting is an effective treatment for warts. Simply seeing the ghost will be counted as a null result.
 
Speaking of warts & quackery, about 20 years ago I got one on my thumb. It was there for about a year and drove me insane with the constant urge to pick at it.

A friend saw it one day and told me her elderly mother had a plant in her garden that gets rid of warts. I was extremely skeptical but decided to humour her away. Anyhow, after applying it for a few days the wart began to dry up and shrivel and after a week or two it fell off and disappeared without a trace, replaced by completely normal skin. I was shocked to put it mildly. Placebo? Who knows.
 
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