Warts can range from mildly annoying to downright painful and ugly, and I have a bit of a love, hate relationship with them.

That’s because the most difficult patient I’ve ever had was a 10 year old boy with a wart.  This young lad must be an adult now – but I still look back on that consultation in despair because in a whole hour, all I could extract from him was that he hated his brother and he loved football – of course his mother hastened to add that he didn’t really hate his brother, and she gave me a few facts about him as a baby, but she didn’t add much to the whole thing, leaving it all to her son.

Normally I really appreciate that, but this time I struggled.  After trying in vain for so long – and learning more than I ever wanted to know about football I thanked my lucky stars it was a wart he came with and not a more serious problem, because there is a homeopathic remedy specifically for warts, and I was assured that it helped in about 80% of cases.  When I knew I’d failed to extract any real information to help me individualise a remedy for him I decided to give him Thuja and hope for the best.  Luckily it worked, and his Mum made an appointment for herself a couple of weeks later.  During that consultation she told me that he and his brother had been conceived by IVF but had never been told, and she didn’t want to tell me in front of him of course.  Interestingly Thuja is very secretive, often hiding anything unpleasant – but that seemed to be a lucky fluke that I never wanted to repeat!

My next patient with a wart was a 4 year old called Charlie.  He had a wart on his eyelid which was hanging into his eye, and because the doctors were unable to treat it there, his mum did some research to find other ways of treating it.  She learned about Thuja from the Internet, and gave the remedy to him herself.  She told me it didn’t do anything, but still hopeful homeopathy could help she brought him to me.

Charlie was a healthy and happy lad apart from this wart, which really was very unsightly and bothersome, but I managed to extract a few other symptoms which helped me narrow the remedy down to one I felt was more suited to him.  Although he was really outgoing and a great joker, he was very anxious about any insects and, more unusual in a young lad; he was pretty fastidious about cleanliness.

I gave him the remedy Medorrhinum and to everyone’s delight the wart disappeared over the following week.

Another instance where Thuja didn’t get rid of a wart was with Oscar.  Oscar was 2 and he had a pretty large wart on his thumb he called his “Owie”.   I was able to individualise the remedy again by taking into consideration a few more of his characteristics or symptoms and gave him Baryta-carb.  Again, within a few days the wart was gone – and I got pictures this time!