[AKN #58] Treating warts, crackhead Uber drivers, and a VERY well done study on mask effectiveness
another krappy newsletter #58
Sup homies?
Or should I say aloha?
You see, I just got back from Hawaii. So I am one with the Hawaiian people.
It was my first time there and I am thrilled to report that I now understand what all the hype is about.
I will absolutely now be one of those people who signs off my emails with Mahalo and instantaneously says “OH WHAT ISLAND?!?” whenever anyone tells me they are going to Hawaii.
Because I fucking get it now.
Unfortunately I am back. Would be cool if I could have stayed another 10 days, but a penny saved is a penny earned and something something importance of work in finding your life’s purpose blah blah blah.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Warts, why they are so hard to get rid of, and how to maximize the probability of getting rid of them
The pandemic gave me a healthy respect for viruses.
There is COVID — in case you hadn't heard about it — but there is another virus near and dear to my heart — or should I say my foot — and that virus made itself known to me all pandemic in the form of a plantar wart.
What even is a wart?
A wart is a small, rough, hard growth on the surface of your skin caused by a type of human papilloma virus (HPV) penetrating through the surface and into the epidermal layer of your skin. When they are on your foot, we call them plantar warts.
You usually contract the virus via contact with an infected surface (ie: a community shower floor, other people’s socks, etc).
How does this virus become a growth on my skin?
Viruses exist for one reason and one reason alone: to replicate and that is what HPV does when it gets into your foot, elbow, hand, head, shoulders, knees, and/or toes.
I covered virus basics 41 weeks ago in this edition, but let me repeat the important parts here about what a virus even is:
What is a virus?
A virus is a ball of DNA or RNA that is housed in a protein shell. Its sole goal in “life” is that it wants to replicate itself and “survive”. Like a horny teenager that listens to Fall Out Boy, a virus is not exactly alive, it just wants to replicate.
How does a virus replicate?
In order to replicate, a virus needs living cells. That is where we come in. We are a collection of tasty living cells. The virus finds its way into us (ie: you breathe in COVID) and it goes about taking over our cells.
In this case, HPV penetrates into your epidermal layer and injects a strand of DNA into the epidermal cells in your foot. Which sounds a lot like a weird sexual kink.
The virus effectively hijacks the mechanisms for cell production in these cells and sends them into hyper drive creating a little manufacturing site for HPV infected cells.
Of course your body has a hard time dealing with this unmitigated cell growth so what happens?
You end up with a little growth that we call a wart.
If we were able to look at a cross section of the wart, it looks a little something like this:
So that is how you go from barefoot in a community shower to a growth on your foot.
OK…cool, but how do I get rid of it? Cause that is the only reason I am still reading, you see, I secretly have a wart and I feel weird telling people about it for some reason so I would like you to just tell me how to get rid of it so I can keep this dark secret to myself
Thank you for the candor, customer avatar that I wrote this article for.
How do you get rid of it is a great question with surprisingly unsatisfying answers.
To quote the answers most given:
Without treatment, most types of warts resolve in months to years.
So one treatment path is time.
But who the fuck wants to sit around and wait for it to disappear?
We are go getters God dammit so what can we do about it?
A number of treatments may speed resolution including salicylic acid applied to the skin and cryotherapy.
Thats right.
WE BURN (OR FREEZE) THIS SHIT TO THE GROUND.
An interactive look at cryotherapy for warts
Cryotherapy is pretty straight forward: we take a liquid nitrogen gun over the top of the wart and freeze it.
Think of it as sicking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr Freeze character on your wart.
The process looks like this:
Boom. You kill the HPV infected cells and America wins. Wart cured. HPV removed…
But wait…months after your cryo treatment, it grows back. What? How could this be?
Well, you see, the treatment doesn’t take all the cells out.
In actuality, often times you are left with a few dormant HPV cells post cryotherapy as seen in the illustration below.
These dormant cells will often just bide their time and wait to re-emerge once the coast is clear. Like the Taliban.
So to maximize the probability that you remove the virus in totality, after you finish cryotherapy you should stick around and keep fighting.
You must continue treating the area if you want the wart completely removed.
But how do you keep treating them?
Do you keep freezing them?
Actually no.
Post cryotherapy wart treatment
You ready for the WORLD CLASS treatment of warts post cryotherapy?
Here it is:
Step 1: Pumice stone the area until its raw
Step 2: Cover it in over the counter salicylic acid medication (Compound W found here)
Step 3: Cover it in duct tape.
That’s right.
Warts have been described at least as far back as 400 BC by Hippocrates, but the WORLD CLASS treatment for warts in 2021 is rub the shit out of it, burn it with acid, and slap some duct tape on it.
All of that AFTER freezing it with liquid nitrogen and waiting for the burns on your feet to heal for three weeks.
These fucking things are resilient!
And the craziest part? Even following all of the above steps does not guarantee you get rid of it!
Follow all of those things consistently every other day and you MIGHT remove the wart on the bottom of your foot.
That is where I am right now in my treatment plan. Just applying duct tape to my recently healed feet like I am on a survivalist show where the terrain is all egg shells.
Will have to let you know how it all turns out, but right now I am determined to win this war!
Also FYI don’t get cryotherapy right before going to Hawaii unless you want to spend an exorbitant amount of time changing your foot bandages from the blisters on your feet and missing stunning hikes.
LAUGH: Tom Segura talking about his crackhead Uber driver
This is an hilarious bit where Tom Segura tells a story about the time his Uber driver gave him a rundown about his favorite drugs.
It takes a hard turn around one minute in when he recounts questioning his driver about what he means by “he loves it all” with respect to drugs:
I love coke. I love heroin. But there’s nothing like smoking rocks, you know what I’m saying?
I was like no. I don’t know what you’re saying.
Whole video is about 3 minutes and a good laugh.
LOVE: Massive state of the art study on masking which shows how effective they are at slowing the spread
This is a really well done study looking at the effectiveness of masks at controlling the spread of COVID.
To give you the cliff notes (and leaving out any experimental design concerns, nuances, etc) the study found the following:
The study promoted masking in some Bangladeshi villages, but not others. Giving it a really good control and experimental arm.
It focused on best practices for ensuring that community masking was actually adopted (such as getting religious leaders to adopt the practice and encourage the members of their congregation to do the same.)
It looked at the effect of community masking. Meaning, everyone wears a mask. Not the effect of a single person wearing a mask. The positive effects they find in this study relate to well executed community masking.
Study found that community masking works. Especially when done with surgical masks.
This study suggests that — if done correctly — masks could reduce the R0 of COVID by a factor of 2.
Which in normal person speak means: say you have a virus where people typically infect 2 other people after they get it, correctly implemented community masking could bring that down to infecting only 1 other person.
That finding alone would suggest that it is a very good idea to implement effective community masking if you are running into hospital capacity constraints or attempting to wait out the time for the development of a vaccine.
Super cool study that really affected the way I am thinking about the pandemic and how to “end” it.
Closing time
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
Kevin