Dr. Scholl's Freeze Away Wart Remover 12 ea

by Dr. Scholl's

Product Features

• Fast and easy way to remove common and plantar warts
• Treated wart fall off within 10 days
• Kit includes 12 disposable applicators and 1 reusable activator

Product Description

Removes Warts Fast as Few as 1 Treatment.
Freeze Away™
Common & Plantar War Remover

This easy-to-use kit has everything you need to quickly and effectively remove common and plantar warts.  Us

Product Details

• Item Weight: 4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• ASIN: B0009EIMS4
• UPC: 011017402268
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #102,496 in Health & Personal Care (See Top 100 in Health & Personal Care)
  • #35 in Health & Personal Care > Health Care > Foot Care > Wart Removal

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Freezing Warts Away, August 26, 2007

By 

kone "kone" (USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

Dr. Scholl's Freeze away is a new over-the-counter means to treat warts. In the past, only an MD could use liquid nitrogen in the treatment of warts. Now the consumer can use the same technology to treat warts at home. At around 20 dollars for a kit (that has 12 treatment applicators), this is a quick and relatively inexpensive means to treat warts. A typical doctor's office co-pay is around 20 - 25 dollars, so this kit is as cost-effective as a doctor's visit, without the hassle of having to go the doctor. I have treated several warts at home with this system with mixed results. Some warts have been eliminated with one treatment (the wart sheds in about 2 weeks). Other warts have been more resistant to treatment and have required multiple treatments, the treatments being 2-3 weeks apart.

In using this system, I have found some treatment tips I would like to share. First, I think it is essential to cut off the top surface of the wart as much as possible. This thins the wart and allows it to freeze deeper, killing the infected cells more thoroughly. Use a sharp scalpel, an emory board, or even sandpaper. Remember that the shavings from the wart may be infective. Second, the treatment time is critical for success. The instructions cite treatment time of 10-20 seconds for most warts, with up to 40 seconds for plantar (sole of feet) warts. The thicker the skin and thicker the wart, the longer you want to hold the cryotherapy tip against the wart. Unsuccessful therapy generally means that the treatment time was not long enough. The goal of cryotherapy is to freeze the wart virus and kill it. Expect the treatment to hurt (sometimes a little - sometimes a lot, depending on where the wart is). After charging the tip with the can, place it against the wart for the amount of time recommended in the instructions. It will "sizzle" as it contacts the wart, and this is desirable, for you want the tip to be cold so that the treated surface turns a frosted white. When you remove the tip from the wart, the surface will be white and frozen, but will quickly warm and become red. It may hurt for minutes to several hours. While the box indicates that only one treatment is necessary, I have found most warts require 1 or more treatments, with 2 - 3 weeks between each treatment. Healing of the frozen surface takes about 1-2 weeks with the hopeful end result that the wart falls off. Generally there is little or no scarring. If the treatment time is longer or you are treating a larger wart, a blister may form. If the blister breaks, be diligent to clean the area to prevent the spread of the wart virus. Avoid contact with the fluid in the blister, as it likely contains wart virus which can infect other areas.

There are three main ways to treat warts: cryotherapy, liquid salicylic acid therapy, and duct tape therapy. All these usually work if applied consistently. Cryotherapy offers no clear advantages over the liquid wart removal (salicylic acid), except that it is quicker and less of a mess. Duct tape therapy (taping the wart for 7 days straight) seems to be just as effective as any other therapy. It is certainly cheap, but the main disadvantage is treating warts in sightly areas such as the fingers, hands or face.

I like cryotherapy for warts for its ease of therapy. If you want to get rid of a wart as quickly as possible, give this treatment a try.

Jim "Konedog" Koenig

For the person who wishes more information on warts see below:

Warts are caused by the Human Papilomavirus. HPV enters the body in an area of broken skin. The virus causes the top layers of the infected skin to grow rapidly, producing a wart. The body has a hard time eliminating warts because warts hide in our own cells where the immune system cannot find or recognize them as being foreign. However, over time, sometimes years, the immune system finally "discovers" the wart virus and produces anti-bodies against it. At this point, all the warts are attacked and eliminated.

Warts can occur anywhere on the body. There are many different kinds of warts. "Common warts" appear most often on the hands, but they may appear anywhere on the body. They are rough, gray-brown, dome-shaped growths. "Plantar warts" occur on the bottom of the feet, are hard, thick patches of skin with dark specks inside the growth.

Flat warts are found on the face, arms, or legs. They are small (about 2-4 mm in diameter), have flat surfaces. and are pink, light brown, dark brown, or skin-colored yellow.

Filiform warts are generally found around the mouth, on or in the nose, or in the beard area. They are flesh-colored with jagged fingerlike edges.

Periungual warts are found under and around the toenails and fingernails. They appear as rough, irregular bumps. These warts are very painful to treat as the fingers are very sensitve with lots of nerve endings.

Genital warts occur on the genitals, around the anus, within the rectum or vagina, or on the cervix. Don't use cryotherapy or salicylic therapy on genital warts - consult with an MD.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How I Got Rid of My Plantar Wart - And How Freeze Away Helped, March 22, 2006

By 

M. M. Jackson (St. Petersburg, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dr. Scholl's Freeze Away Wart Remover 12 ea (Health and Beauty)

As we speak, my plantar wart has been reduced to a small pencil-tip sized darkish spot on my foot, waiting to fall off.

I can't feel it, the size of it (size of a dime!), the depth of it (oh so painful) and the PAIN of it is all gone. Just a little dark calloused spot waiting to grow skin underneath and fall off.

Here is how I did it:

The wart started off small. The size of a period on a page, it felt like I had gotten a small shard of glass in my foot. It was hard and in one specific spot.

Then I started to fool with it: thinking it was a spliter, and quite tired of the small annoyance, I used pliers to try to grab it and pull.

It pulled the skin out but suspiciously nothing came out. I thought I saw a dark spot. I think now that it was just a wart blood vessel.

After this, it grew in size. An "o" on a page. A pea. A dime. It got that big!

It really hurt, I had to walk fairly cautiously on the foot.

The wart was just on the lower edge of the ball of my left foot. In other words, prime pressure spot!

For "proper" treatment, I started off with the Dr. Scholl's FreezeAway wart remover, thinking it would be the best and quickest. Short recap of that: it HELPS (if not works all alone), but only if you are aggresssive.

I started off doing the freeze treatment, but what it seemed to do was kill and harden (like a callous) the top of the wart, but it would not reach the depths of the wart and kill it. The wart seemed to keep burrowing.

One thing I learned about FreezeAway: an important thing to do with the freeze system is to wash the foot first and dry it off. It will retain that sort of freshly-showered moistness (NOT wetness). This seemed to help carry the freezing temperature down deeper. I did not do this each time, and wondered why sometimes it did not seem to help.

Dr. Scholl's recommends freezing your wart, waiting two weeks for
it to fall off, then if it doesn't, re-freezing and waiting again, up to four treatments like this.

This procedure did not work for me.

The trouble I found is that the freeze does not get deep enough to kill the whole wart. It will kill the top, but then the bottom is still left to burrow.

I did this for the first two 2-week periods, but then after realizing it wasn't working, I got more aggressive.

I started using Duct tape to smother and choke the wart, as recommended online. It kept the wart soft and less painful. No actual diminishment in size was noticed just with the duct tape, and this was after three or four weeks.

The duct tape turned out to be another worthy purchase, a supporting member in this wart-killing team of players. Experiment with shapes and cut the tape to your foot.

I went out and bought Dr. Scholl's salcylic acid pads (Clear Away).

They were not the plantar wart kind, just the regular kind, as I
had developed a wart on my finger.

I put a pad on the plantar wart and it did what it is supposed to: it made the wart and the skin around it soften, becoming puffy and white and easily removable. But after removing that skin, the wart itself remained, like a plateu of pain.

I noticed, though, that the top layer of the wart was somewhat puffy and soft as well, albeit darker in color, more red and raw looking.

Now, this is possibly dangerous and was quite painful, but I used a razor blade (sterilized with Purell hand sanitizer) like a saw to saw off the top of the wart. It was like butterflying a steak, back and forth back and forth, gently, gradually. It did not bleed, like it had in the past when I had rubbed it too much with a pumice stone.

I refroze the newly cut-down wart and covered it. With less height, it did not hurt as much when walking.

As above, when freezing the wart, I learned that if I froze the
wart with washed feet, I could see the wart and the skin around it turning white. This is what you want.

The box says leave the freeze pad on for 40 seconds to fully freeze a plantar wart. This is correct, if your feet were just washed and towel-dried. It will just start to get painful and the obvious whiteness will be evident at 40 seconds. The whiteness will gradually disappear as the skin warms again.

I left the duct tape on overnight and the wart would seem to "die
off" at it's top, hardening and becoming less painful and raw-feeling.

Once the skin had started to heal and I felt safe putting another
salcylic acid pad on (time period being 24 to 48 hours, those pads really sting and hurt on any sort of raw skin), I would to start the process all over again.

Use your own good judgement! You will know pain and what's right or wrong once you have seen what the salcylic acid Clear Away pads do.

I would remove the salcylic acid pad after two days and then "work on" the wart, basically using fingernail scissors sanitized with Purell hand sanitizer to try to pick that plateu of pain out, by removing puffed white skin around the edges and then digging sideways into the base of it. This was kind of like poking into it's side and shoveling it with a sharp point.

I did get stuff up, or a dig would rip a slash into the wart, sometimes cutting clear through the diameter of it, creating wart fragments rooted into my foot skin. This would make it easier to try to loosen and pick out the wart fragments. They would come out, or sometimes they would not, as they were too painful.

By fragments I mean the of the dead skin piece the wart virus creates, not trying to dig "at the virus" itself at the very root of the wart area. I am talking about the firmer stuff above all that, which is not so painful (but still quite agonizing).

Do not get to the point where you are bleeding, you will know when you are reaching that point, although none of this stuff is
comfortable.

SPECIAL NOTE: Something very interesting that marked a turning point in the proceedings was I would use Purell on the scissors but then also the site of the wart. It seemed to make the skin a little more brittle and less elastic, so it would remove easier. It also had the same effect on the wart part itself.

And after a couple days of using Purell on the wart site, I noticed the skin healing faster, closing in around the wart, etc.

I LIKE PURELL! It was clearly a turning point in hygiene and healing of this thing.

I noticed the wart stopped hurting so much on top, stopped feeling so "raw" and "alive." It started losing sensation, even deeper down. I would use this opportunity to shave the top off with a razor, pick out whatever dead/dry stuff from the wart I could with tweezers, then re-freeze and cover for a few days.

I would re-freeze it with damage to it, it seemed to help the
freeze get deeper down. You want ALL the wart material to freeze eventually, and this means removing layers, exposing deeper areas, etc. and freezing. If you are bleeding, obviously do not freeze. But if your wart has been pumiced down, parts picked or shoveled out of it, etc. and you feel like you can handle re-freezing, do it. It will get deeper down and what freezes, dies.

After a while of:

Freezing/covering with duct tape
(waiting 2 days)
Remove cover, purell, shave and/or shovel and pull (depending on
pain level), purell again, Freeze, cover with duct tape
(2 days)
remove cover, purell, shave/shovel/pull out what I could without
bleeding, purell again, freeze, cover with duct tape,
(2 days)
etc.

It not only started to come out and die, but also shrink. The skin around it started growing in. Wart material started coming out with little pain, it was harder and drier and deader.

I kept doing this (surprisingly few times) and it is now just a small, pain-free dark spot of dead wart waiting to come off.

So, get the following:

- Roll of all-weather Duct or Duck tape (both are higher-strength
formulations over the regular duct tape)

- bottle of Purell (or at least 60% alcohol content if competing
product! No less!)

- Dr. Scholl's FreezeAway system for Plantar Warts

- Dr. Scholl's ClearAway salcylic acid pads

and go to town!

Significant pain will be involved and small bleeding occasionally
if you slip up and dig too far. However, you do not want to bleed if you can help it! Turn back and try again when the site has healed if it starts to get to that point.

All in all, I am a much happier camper and Dr. Scholls' products did help kill the wart, if not remove it entierly alone.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars desperate measures, June 8, 2008

By 

SpiritChild "spiritchild" (Amherst, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This product works very well with small warts, but not too well with larger warts. For larger warts, you should use Freeze away along with Dr Scholl's medicated pads, which will help to pull the wart out. Otherwise you may be just wasting your time and money. If you are like me (on your feet all day) than you will prefer using the pads. They will keep the wart from going deeper and remove them faster than freezing alone.

This is a great product, but it's overpriced and should include better instructions, a pedicure file and medicated pads. If you use this product, you should use a pumice stone or pedicure file to remove the layer of skin that guards the wart, otherwise you will be wasting your time.

Dr Scholl's should do away with the expensive plastic box. I would much rather have more applicators than a fancy box, and there should be more applicators as the aerosol can has more liquid than can possibly be used.