[insonable]

poison oak was supposedly a chumash treatment for warts. i tried it and it worked! grind up some leaves into a paste, sand the wart down a bit, apply the paste, and cover with tape. it may be that the poison oak is enough to trigger an immune response which actually rids you of the wart.

[denton-scratch]

According to TFA, what may have worked is the tape.

[m463]

I remember that study with mice where some mice were kept in a simple environment, while others had a rich environment with all kinds of things like a mouse wheel.

when the mice died, the simple environment mice had lots less interconnected neurons in their brain than the complex environment mice.

turns out it wasn't the complex environment that caused the brain development, it was the exercise wheel.

[ethbr1]

Sounds like a plausible theory. Nudging your immune system into flooding a response to the area and giving everything a closer look, via irritants, makes sense.

And also explains the diverse array of purportedly efficacious substances.

[denton-scratch]

I received microwave treatment for veruccas. It was administered via a fancy machine, that produced microwaves at the nozzle of a meter-long pipe.

The purported mechanism of action was not to destroy the verucca, although that was the immediate effect; they didn't try to hit all of them. The purported mechanism was to cause damage that would provoke the immune system; it would learn the properties of the virus, and then attack it wherever it found it.

It worked; all my veruccas disappeared, including ones that hadn't been zapped.

I have to say that this was easily the most-painful medical treatment I have ever undergone. Each targeted verucca got a 5s blast, twice per treatment, over a programme of three treatments. Each blast caused me to scream out loud and swear. I apologised to the podiatrist, saying I hoped I hadn't annoyed her neighbours. She said not to worry, everyone screams and swears. It was like having a sharpened red-hot screwdriver pushed into the sole of my foot.

[UncleOxidant]

No way am I going to collect poison oak leaves and mash them up into a paste. You'd likely get some airborne aerosols doing that which wouldn't be pleasant.

[s1artibartfast]

I dont think that aerosols is a real risk. It is quite difficult to create particulate small enough (<1um). Wet grinding should eliminate any small risk that exists.