Today, I’ll be talking about 5 major differences between a wart and a corn and how you can tell the difference.
Difference number 1 - one is caused by a virus, the other is a result of pressure and friction
A wart is caused by the human papillomavirus or HPV for short. HPV thrives in warm, moist environments, such as locker room floors and around swimming pools. The virus is transmitted by direct contact and may be picked up easily if you have an opening or crack in your skin. A young girl was at the pool. She stepped on a stick, which gave her a splinter; her dad removed the splinter but a day or two after, because of the skin opening, it had turned into a wart.
Corns, on the other hand… or other foot...is not caused by a virus but by constant localised pressure and friction to a particular area, usually a boney prominence. And the majority of the time, it's from ill-fitting shoes.
Difference number 2 - one can be developed anywhere on the body. The other is localised to the foot.
So a wart being a virus, can develop anywhere on the body - on your feet, your hands, anywhere. Essentially any area where you have skin, you can develop a wart.
Corns being a result of pressure and friction, are generally found over boney prominences, so under the balls of your feet, bunions, tip of your toes, anywhere on your feet that could rub against your shoe or the ground.
Difference number 3 - skin lines run through a corn and around a wart.
If you look carefully at your skin, you can see these skin lines. These skin lines will run around a wart. However, they will run through a corn. So let me give you an example; if you look at the picture of a wart here, you can see the skin lines run around the wart, whereas in the corn, you can see that the lines run through.
Difference number 4 - A wart hurts more when you squeeze the lesion; Corns hurt more when direct pressure is applied.
This is a physical test. There is generally more pain when you apply direct pressure to a corn. If you have a wart, generally, direct pressure would not illicit anywhere near as much discomfort as if you were to squeeze the lesion.
Difference number 5 - corns have a core, whereas warts have tiny blood vessels.
This isn’t super obvious because you need to cut back the overlying skin to see what’s underneath. But if you take the top layer of skin off of a wart, you will see there are small black dots. These are actually tiny little blood vessels that supply blood to the wart.
If you take the top layer off of a corn, you will see a single dark center. This is the core or the nucleus. So with pressure and friction, this core gets formed and pushed deeper into the skin.
So how is it managed?
So as you could probably gather by now, even though these two lesions look similar, they are very different. And as a result, the management of these conditions is also different.
Management of a corn includes physically debriding the dead skin and then enucleating the corn, which is a fancy way of saying you have to cut out the corn. Then we need to address the reason why there's pressure; the majority of the time, it is because of the shoes. If it is, we need to look at more appropriate footwear or add extra cushioning inside the shoes. Worst-case scenario, if it's due to an outrageous boney prominence like a nasty hammer or claw toe, a really bad bunion, then we may need to look at surgical correction.
The management of warts depends on how severe it is. If it's a minor wart, there are topical treatments that you can get from the chemist. If it's a wart that has been there for a while and is quite deep, then you may need to see your GP or podiatrist to get it burnt off with nitrogen and may be salicylic acid.
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