We often have patients come to our clinic and they will call the front office staff, requesting an appointment to have a plantar wart treated. When we do see them back in the exam room, we find that is not a plantar wart at all. Even their family doctor will have frozen this painful area on the bottom the foot several times but it just keeps coming back.
It turns out that this is actually either callus with a deep core or what we call a porokeratosis. There are significant differences. Plantar warts are very vascular. The plantar verruca is a viral infection that is like a parasite. And the plantar wart "wants" its own blood supply. The wart recruits our own body to produce more local blood vessels in a process called angioneogenesis. This is very similar to the same phenomenon that some tumors demand their own blood supply through the same process (angioneogenesis). So at our clinic, when we evaluate these and remove the outer callus layer, the deep layer will either have pinpoint clotted capillaries or active pinpoint bleeding. This is seen in the vast majority of true plantar verruca. We specialize in diagnosis and treatment of plantar verruca.
If you are experiencing foot or ankle pain, please give us a call at 425-391-8666 or make an appointment online today.
