Duct tape, warts and all.

Duct tape brings out our inventive, slightly kooky side. People use it to make everything from wallets to fake roses. In a brief ramble around the Internet, we stumbled on a Web site running a contest for the best prom outfit made out of the stuff.

Given this versatility, it wasn't so surprising when a group of doctors in Ohio reported that duct tape could get rid of warts. Their study showed that covering warts with duct tape was a lot more effective than cryotherapy, an accepted treatment that involves freezing warts with liquid nitrogen. It was just the kind of offbeat finding that launches a thousand headlines.

Warts are a response to infection by the human papillomavirus. Skin cells divide and extra layers of tissue heap up, forming a hard bump. They're usually harmless, but depending on the location, warts can be uncomfortable -- and, of course, unsightly.

One of the theories about how duct tape might treat warts is that the skin underneath the tape starts to break down a little bit, stirring up a local immune response that attacks the human papillomavirus. Another possibility is that the tape "debrides and debulks" the wart, removing some of the top (and, unfortunately, the skin around the wart) whenever it's pulled off.

But before getting too wrapped up in explaining how duct tape might work, we also have to consider the possibility that it doesn't -- or at least not very well. Aside from the initial report, the research results haven't been looking so good. In 2006, for example, a Dutch group reported the results of a six-week trial that compared duct tape to those little donut-shaped pads for corns and calluses. The duct tape was only ...