What Are Warts?

An Essay

On a Friday in 1980, a Duke University student named Bob had twenty to thirty plantar warts covering his hands. They were noticeable, ugly, impossible to miss. He went home to South Carolina for the weekend to visit family. On Monday he was back at the dorm. No warts. Not one. His roommates — one of whom was a young medical student named Tom Cowan — were stunned and asked what had happened. Bob said his grandmother was a faith healer. She had placed her hands over his, spoken some words, and held them there for fifteen or twenty minutes. He felt a tingling sensation. The next day the warts fell off. They never came back.¹

That story should end the conversation about warts being caused by a virus. No virus disappears overnight because an elderly woman in South Carolina held someone’s hands. Antiviral medications take weeks. Even the body’s own cleansing and repair processes take days at minimum. Whatever happened to Bob’s warts between Friday and Monday had nothing to do with a microorganism being hunted down and destroyed.

But the story doesn’t end the conversation. It can’t, because too much depends on warts being viral — a diagnostic category, a vaccine programme, a pharmaceutical pipeline, an entire infrastructure of dermatological intervention. So the story gets filed under “anecdotal” and the official narrative continues undisturbed.

This essay disturbs it.

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What You Already Know

Most people who have had warts have already noticed things that don’t fit the viral story. You’ve had a wart frozen off by a dermatologist and it came back. Or you ignored a wart for a year and it vanished on its own. Or your child had warts that appeared during a stressful period and resolved when things settled down. Or you tried a folk remedy — duct tape, banana peel, raw potato, apple cider vinegar — and it worked, despite having no antiviral mechanism whatsoever.

The medical literature itself documents these observations. Spontaneous resolution of warts is so common that clinical trials for wart treatments struggle with their placebo arms — too many warts disappear in the control group.² Warts are, in fact, the single most placebo-responsive condition in the medical literature. Hypnosis eliminates warts. Suggestion eliminates warts. In one well-known study, patients were told a dye painted on their warts was a powerful new treatment. It was inert. The warts resolved.³

If warts are an active viral infection — a pathogen replicating inside your cells — none of this is explicable. Viruses do not respond to suggestion. They do not vanish because someone believed a painted dye was medicine. They do not fall off overnight after a grandmother’s touch.

Something else is going on.

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The Virus That Was Never There

The conventional claim is straightforward: warts are caused by Human Papillomavirus (HPV). There are said to be over 100 strains, with different types assigned to different wart presentations — common warts, plantar warts, flat warts, genital warts. The entire HPV vaccine programme rests on an extension of this claim: that certain strains cause not just warts but cervical cancer.

The foundational problem is that no virus has ever been found in any wart.¹ This is not a fringe assertion. It is a statement about what the evidence actually shows when you look at methodology rather than conclusions.

The HPV story traces back to Harald zur Hausen, who received a Nobel Prize in 2008 for his work linking HPV to cervical cancer. Canadian biologist David Crowe analysed zur Hausen’s two foundational papers from 1983 and 1984 and found the following:⁴

The origin of the cloned DNA was unclear, making it impossible to confirm a virus was present. A large number of cervical tumours were screened without success before one was found containing the target DNA — raising the possibility of coincidence rather than causation. The hybridisation was conducted under “nonstringent” conditions, meaning the DNA match was less than perfect. The extracted DNA showed less than 0.1% match with known HPV samples. Rather than concluding this DNA had nothing to do with HPV, the researchers declared it a new type — HPV 16.⁴

This is the evidential foundation for the entire HPV story. A fragment of DNA, with less than one-tenth of one percent similarity to what it was supposed to be, found after extensive searching, under loose matching conditions, declared a new virus type because the alternative — that it wasn’t HPV at all — would have ended the research programme.

When Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Köhnlein wrote directly to the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) requesting four categories of evidence — proof of HPV isolation, proof of causation, proof that non-viral factors could be excluded, and proof of vaccine safety — the DKFZ provided studies for three of the four. The one they could not address: proof that non-viral causes could be excluded as primary.⁴ They did not respond to follow-up questions.

The correlation numbers tell the same story from a different angle. Up to 80% of women are said to “contract” HPV at some point. In 80% of those women, the virus reportedly disappears on its own. Of the remaining 20% with “persistent infection,” fewer than 0.1% develop cervical cancer. Lutz Gissmann of the DKFZ acknowledged: “We just don’t know why most women are able to cope with the virus.”⁴ Matthias Dürst of the University of Jena confirmed that “the infection with the papillomavirus alone still does not cause cancer” — that additional genetic changes on chromosomes are required, but no study has proven a papillomavirus initiates those changes.⁵

A condition that 80% of people supposedly carry, that 99.9% of carriers never develop disease from, that resolves spontaneously in the vast majority, and whose foundational isolation rests on a sub-0.1% DNA match — this is not a proven causal agent. It is a hypothesis that was never validated and then locked in place by a Nobel Prize and a vaccine programme.

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The Diagnostic Category Problem

The word “wart” covers an enormous range of growths with different characteristics, locations, and behaviours. Common warts on the hands. Plantar warts on the soles of the feet. Flat warts on the face. Filiform warts around the eyes and mouth. Genital warts in intimate areas. Periungual warts around the nails.

Conventional medicine assigns different HPV “types” to each presentation, as though this explains the variation. But the assignment is circular: the virus types are defined by the DNA fragments found in each location, and then those fragments are said to cause the condition at that location. The underlying assumption — that all these different growths share a single viral cause — is asserted, not demonstrated.

A simpler observation: different areas of the body eliminate different types of waste. The skin on your hands is structurally different from the skin on your genitals, which is different from the skin on the soles of your feet. If warts are excretions rather than infections, you would expect different presentations in different locations, because different tissues process different toxins. The variation doesn’t require a hundred viral strains. It requires a body with different skin types doing the same thing — eliminating what it can’t process through normal channels — in different ways at different sites.

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What a Wart Actually Is

Dr. Tom Cowan’s framework is direct: a wart is an excretion of proteinaceous toxins through the skin. The body’s primary elimination pathways are the bowels, kidneys, lungs, and sweat glands. When these pathways are overwhelmed — by dietary toxins, pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, environmental chemicals, or metabolic waste the body can’t process — the skin becomes an accessory elimination route. The body pushes material out through the skin, and in the process of doing so, forms the characteristic raised, roughened growth we call a wart.¹

This framework explains every observation that the viral model cannot.

Spontaneous resolution. If warts are a response to toxic burden, they resolve when the burden decreases. A change in diet, a period of reduced stress, improved elimination through other channels — any of these shifts the internal terrain enough that the body no longer needs the accessory excretion pathway. The wart, having served its purpose, is reabsorbed or shed. No antiviral intervention required.

Recurrence after removal. Freezing, cutting, burning, or chemically destroying a wart removes the visible growth but does nothing about the underlying toxic burden. The body still has material it needs to excrete. It will form another wart, often at the same site or nearby. Dermatologists see this constantly and have no explanation within their framework except “the virus wasn’t fully eradicated” — which is unfalsifiable and conveniently perpetual.

Response to suggestion and placebo. This is the observation that demolishes the viral model most completely. If the mind can eliminate a wart — through hypnosis, faith healing, placebo, or belief in an inert treatment — then the growth is under the body’s active control. It is not an invading pathogen occupying tissue against the body’s will. It is something the body is doing, and can stop doing when the conditions change. A shift in mental or emotional state can alter the body’s eliminative priorities, its energetic patterns, its tissue behaviour. This is incomprehensible if a virus is running the show. It is entirely logical if the body is running the show.

Childhood prevalence and adolescent resolution. Warts are extremely common in children and typically resolve without treatment during adolescence. The conventional explanation — that the “immune system” learns to fight the virus — doesn’t account for why this learning takes years, or why it happens on a developmental timeline rather than an immunological one. A terrain explanation is more coherent: children’s eliminative systems are still maturing, their diets are often poor (sugar, processed food, chemical additives), and their bodies use the skin as an overflow pathway. As the body matures and eliminative capacity increases, the warts are no longer necessary.

The faith healer’s hands. Bob’s grandmother didn’t administer an antiviral. She transmitted something — energy, intention, information, whatever framework you prefer — that changed his body’s relationship to the growths it had formed. Within hours, twenty to thirty warts detached and fell away. The body released them because whatever the grandmother did altered the conditions that had produced them. This is not mysterious if you accept that the body creates warts purposefully. It is only mysterious if you insist a virus was in charge.

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Warts as Terrain Signal

The broader principle at work — articulated by Cowan and by practitioners working within the terrain tradition — is that the body does not produce symptoms randomly or maliciously. Every symptom is a strategy. Fever burns waste. Mucus traps and expels debris. Diarrhoea flushes the gut. Skin eruptions push toxins outward.

Warts fit this pattern. They are not an attack on the body by an external agent. They are the body solving a problem — moving material from the inside to the outside through the largest eliminative organ available.

This principle, that growths are toxic in origin, appears across the terrain literature. Toxins accumulate wherever circulation is impaired.⁶ The skin, as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg described it, contains millions of pores functioning as “millions of little sewers” — constantly expelling waste, breathing, absorbing.⁷ When internal detoxification pathways are overburdened, the skin picks up the slack.

The body’s wisdom in this process is evident in how warts behave. They form in areas of high contact and use — hands, feet, skin folds — where circulation patterns and mechanical stress create natural sites for material to accumulate and be expressed. They grow slowly, giving the body time to move material out gradually. They have defined borders, containing the excretion to a localised area rather than spreading it diffusely across the skin. And they resolve when the underlying conditions change — a hallmark of purposeful biological behaviour, not infectious disease.

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What Conventional Treatment Gets Wrong

Standard dermatological treatment for warts includes cryotherapy (freezing with liquid nitrogen), salicylic acid application, electrosurgery, laser treatment, and in the case of genital warts, drugs marketed as immune modulators and even surgical excision.

Every one of these approaches targets the visible growth while ignoring the reason the growth exists. It is the equivalent of removing the warning light from your dashboard because you don’t like the glow. The engine problem remains.

Recurrence rates after conventional wart treatment are high — commonly cited between 30% and 70% depending on the method and location.⁸ This alone should prompt the question: if we are successfully eliminating the virus, why does it keep coming back? The standard answer — viral reservoirs in surrounding tissue, incomplete eradication, reinfection — is a series of untestable escape clauses that protect the theory from its own failures.

A terrain-based approach works differently. Rather than destroying the growth, you address the conditions that produced it.

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A Different Approach

If warts are the body’s way of excreting what it cannot process through normal channels, the logical response has two components: reduce what’s coming in, and support the body’s ability to move it out.

Stop the inputs. Processed food, refined sugar, pharmaceutical drugs, and environmental chemicals are the primary contributors to the toxic burden that overwhelms normal elimination. Cleaning up the diet — real food, properly raised animal fats, fermented vegetables, adequate hydration with clean water — reduces the load the body is trying to manage. Cowan notes that warts stop recurring once a person stops eating abnormal food and putting toxic material in their body.¹

Support elimination. The bowels, kidneys, liver, lungs, and skin all participate in moving waste out. Adequate hydration, movement, sweating, proper bowel function, and time outdoors in sunlight all support these pathways. When primary elimination is working well, the skin doesn’t need to serve as an overflow system.

Address the growth directly. Barbara O’Neill’s work provides the most detailed practical framework for topical treatment within a terrain paradigm.⁹ Her standout remedy is the castor oil compress. Castor oil penetrates deeper than any other oil and breaks up what O’Neill calls “unnatural formations” — lumps, bumps, congestion, adhesions, and abnormal tissue growths. Applied nightly directly over a wart, it works to break down the formation over time. Her duration principle applies: a wart present for years may take months; a recent wart may resolve in weeks.

O’Neill’s other directly applicable remedies include topical iodine (Lugol’s solution), which she describes as “an extremely effective fungicide” — applied directly to the wart daily.⁹ Garlic, sliced thin and applied to the wart with surrounding skin protected, delivers potent antifungal and tissue-disrupting action.⁹ And charcoal poultices, applied on alternate nights, draw toxins and microbial waste from the tissue.⁹

The systemic dimension matters as much as the topical. O’Neill’s anti-fungal programme — eliminate sugar, yeast, and old food; rotate antifungal agents like garlic, olive leaf extract, oregano oil, and grapefruit seed extract; restore gut flora with cultured foods — addresses the internal terrain that produced the wart in the first place.⁹ Without this systemic correction, topical treatment alone is just a gentler version of the dermatologist’s liquid nitrogen: removing the expression while leaving the cause intact.

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The Mind Dimension

The faith healing story is not an anomaly. It is the extreme end of a well-documented spectrum.

Warts have responded to hypnotic suggestion in controlled studies.³ They have responded to placebo treatments with no pharmacological activity. They have responded to folk remedies whose proposed mechanisms are physically impossible — rubbing a potato on the wart and burying it, for instance, or “selling” the wart to someone else through a verbal ritual.

The mainstream explanation for these observations is vague hand-waving about “immune modulation through psychoneuroimmunological pathways” — which is a technical way of saying the mind changed the body’s behaviour without being able to explain how. Within the terrain framework, no special explanation is needed. If the body is actively producing and maintaining the wart as part of an eliminative strategy, then any shift in the body’s internal state — including shifts initiated by mental, emotional, or energetic changes — can alter that strategy. The grandmother’s hands didn’t kill a virus. They changed something in Bob’s body that made the warts unnecessary. His body released them within hours.

This has implications far beyond warts. If a growth the body has produced can be dissolved by a change in consciousness, then the body’s relationship to its own tissue is far more dynamic, far more responsive, and far more intelligent than the mechanistic model allows. The wart is a small doorway into a very large room.

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The Pattern

Warts follow the same pattern as every other condition attributed to a virus that was never properly isolated.

A common human experience — skin growths that come and go — gets assigned a viral cause. The virus is “found” through indirect methods (DNA fragments, antibody tests, cell cultures) rather than direct isolation and purification. The correlation between the virus and the condition is weak (most carriers never develop symptoms). Spontaneous resolution is common but unexplained within the model. A vaccine or pharmaceutical treatment is developed and marketed. And the original question — why do these growths actually form? — is never answered, because the viral attribution made the question seem unnecessary.

Meanwhile, the actual cause — a body overwhelmed by toxins it cannot eliminate through normal channels — goes unaddressed. The wart is frozen off. It comes back. It’s frozen off again. The patient is told the virus is persistent. The cycle continues.

The faith healer’s grandmother in South Carolina wasn’t operating within this cycle. She was operating in a different paradigm entirely — one in which the body is wise, symptoms have purpose, and healing happens when conditions change. Twenty to thirty warts, gone by Monday morning, never to return.

That’s not an anecdote. That’s evidence.

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References

1. Cowan, T. Wednesday Webinar, February 11, 2026. Discussion of warts, faith healing, and terrain-based understanding of skin growths.

2. Dall’oglio, F. et al. “The treatment of common warts: a review.” Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, 2003.

3. Spanos, N.P., Stenstrom, R.J., & Johnston, J.C. “Hypnosis, placebo, and suggestion in the treatment of warts.” Psychosomatic Medicine, 1988; 50(3): 245-260.

4. Engelbrecht, T. & Köhnlein, C. & Bailey, S. Virus Mania, 3rd edition, 2021. Chapter on HPV; including analysis of zur Hausen, H. “A papillomavirus DNA from a cervical carcinoma.” PNAS USA, June 1983; and zur Hausen, H. “A new type of papillomavirus DNA.” EMBO Journal, May 1984.

5. Dürst, M. via Hein, S. Raum&Zeit 144/2006; Gissmann, L. via Tolzin, H. Impf-Report, Jan/Feb 2006.

6. Terrain Therapy, 2022 edition.

7. O’Neill, B. True Cause of Disease lecture series, referencing Kellogg, J.H. on skin as eliminative organ.

8. Sterling, J.C. et al. “British Association of Dermatologists’ guidelines for the management of cutaneous warts.” British Journal of Dermatology, 2014; 171(4): 696-712.

9. O’Neill, B. Synthesised from: Self Heal By Design (Chapters 5 and 9); Natural Remedies lecture; Simple Home Remedies lecture; Home Remedies lecture; Food lecture (acid/alkaline balance).

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New Biology Clinic

For those of you looking for practitioners who actually understand terrain medicine and the principles we explore here, I want to share something valuable. Dr. Tom Cowan—whose books and podcasts have shaped much of my own thinking about health—has created the New Biology Clinic, a virtual practice staffed by wellness specialists who operate from the same foundational understanding. This isn’t about symptom suppression or the conventional model. It’s about personalized guidance rooted in how living systems actually work. The clinic offers individual and family memberships that include not just private consults, but group sessions covering movement, nutrition, breathwork, biofield tuning, and more. Everything is virtual, making it accessible wherever you are. If you’ve been searching for practitioners who won’t look at you blankly when you mention structured water or the importance of the extracellular matrix, this is worth exploring. Use discount code “Unbekoming” to get $100 off the member activation fee. You can learn more and sign up at newbiologyclinic.com