It's not by ripping the wart out of your skin as you rip off the duct tape.

Instead, doctors say the tape seems to irritate the wart and cause an immune system reaction that attacks the warts.

In the study, patients wore tape over the wart. They occasionally removed the tape, soaked the skin and scraped the wart with an emery board or pumice stone.

The treatment continued for up to two months.

Eighty-five percent of patients treated with tape lost their warts. In contrast, standard treatment of freezing off warts with liquid nitrogen worked with 60 percent.

The research was done at Madigan Army Medical Center near Tacoma, Washington. It's in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.