Guest Post by A Midwestern Doctor
Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is a simple, inexpensive compound found throughout nature whose remarkable properties allow it both to treat a wide range of illnesses and to facilitate the use of many different (FDA approved) medical therapies. Yet, it exists in a strange limbo: it is one of the most extensively studied and used medicinal compounds, but most mainstream sources insist there’s no evidence it works for anything beyond its single FDA-approved use, interstitial cystitis, despite the fact that physicians and scientists, seeing its promise, independently conducted tens of thousands of studies demonstrating its therapeutic utility and that DMSO, on the basis of that data, is widely used in foreign medical systems.
DMSO’s peculiar status results from the fact it cannot be profited off of (e.g., a twenty dollar bottle will last a user for months). Because of this, there has been no incentive within the medical field to secure a costly approval for it within the FDA’s “pay-to-play system.” Rather, the FDA went to war against DMSO for decades (despite immense public protest to legalize DMSO) and as a result, almost all of the approved DMSO preparations on the market are DMSO pharmaceutical combinations (as they can be patented and then marked up). Likewise, there was no incentive within the natural health field to market it as a supplement, which has resulted in it becoming mostly forgotten by the time a 1994 law took away the FDA’s ability to restrict natural supplements like DMSO.
I find this egregious, as DMSO is able to:
•Treat a variety of common conditions (e.g., pain and injuries) in a dramatically effective, cheaper, and most importantly safer manner than the existing therapeutic options.
•Treat a variety of challenging and tragic illnesses that have few or no treatment options, in many cases producing recoveries so dramatic they are regarded as “miraculous” or “impossible.”
Since many of DMSO’s most incredible effects are seen with neurological disorders (that often otherwise lack satisfactory treatment options), a significant portion of the DMSO literature base has focused on this area. So, over the last six months, in an effort to make this option available to people, I’ve tried to concisely summarize approximately 4,500 studies and 1,000 reader reports of DMSO’s utility for neurological conditions. Unfortunately, given how much information this was, despite my absolute best efforts to compress it, the four articles I wrote1,2,3,4 still totaled to 142,000 words. However, now that those four have been done (which I felt had to be done first as many of the claims I’ve made seem impossible within the conventional framework), it is possible to write a much shorter (and more accessible) summary of the DMSO’s uses in neurology which can link back to the more detailed pieces which provide all the corroborating references one might need before considering trying DMSO.
How DMSO Works
James Miller, MD: It is my impression, with no hard data, that ~80% of everything people see neurologists for goes away with DMSO. That is what my patients reflect back to me who choose to trial DMSO for their neurological problems.
DMSO’s unique ability to treat a very wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders makes it critical to understand how this happens, both because skeptical parties require mechanistic plausibility to accept that it can work, and because DMSO’s ability to treat so many challenging illnesses suggests whatever it does addresses the foundational causes of disease medicine, despite its best efforts, has not been able to identify. DMSO’s mechanisms, in turn, break down into three categories: the conventionally recognized ones (with wide support in the literature), the documented but overlooked ones, and the mostly-unrecognized “alternative” ones (which have some supporting literature) that I believe underlie many diseases.
Since many of DMSO’s therapeutic effects are uniquely tailored to the needs of the nervous system, in those four articles (which began the second draft of the DMSO series), I laid out extensive body of research demonstrating those therapeutic mechanisms. They are as follows:
Widely Recognized Mechanisms
Documented but Overlooked Mechanisms
Unrecognized Mechanisms
With this context in mind, let’s now review what the data (and many corroborating reader reports) show DMSO does for a wide range of neurological disorders.
Note: for the majority of the conditions described below, I located and summarized at least 100 studies supporting the use of DMSO for them in the longer articles.
Strokes
Roughly 800,000 Americans have a stroke each year, and despite immense efforts to improve outcomes, strokes remain a leading cause of death and disability. This is largely because clot-busting tPA, the only approved drug for ischemic strokes, cannot be given until a CT scan rules out a brain bleed (so treatment is typically delayed by hours as brain tissue continues to die), reaches only a small fraction of patients within its window, meaningfully benefits about 13% of those who receive it,1 and carries a 6.4% risk of a symptomatic brain bleed.1 After a stroke, there is also essentially no therapy that restores lost function. DMSO sidesteps each of these problems, as it treats ischemic strokes, partially treats hemorrhagic ones, has no known risk of worsening a bleed, can be given at home or in an ambulance, and protects and revives the brain tissue a stroke would otherwise destroy. For this reason, one of my primary goals has been to raise awareness of DMSO for strokes and move toward emergency services (or patients at home) giving it immediately while the standard workup proceeds (since some bleeds require emergency neurosurgery).
Supporting this are hundreds of studies (most in animals, plus a large number where DMSO was combined with another agent), with the human ones including the following:
Stanley Jacob (the physician who pioneered the research into DMSO) considered DMSO so important for strokes that he gave patients home stroke kits so they could inject it themselves the moment symptoms began, and a 1992 review concluded DMSO outperformed mannitol, dexamethasone, and barbiturates as a neuroprotectant for strokes.1
Note: many profound stroke recoveries exist within the DMSO literature. For example, one author reported that a teacher found unconscious after a major stroke was treated with DMSO at home within minutes and was back teaching with no disability when school resumed after the Christmas break, while a woman who had been in a coma for three months after her stroke began responding a month after starting topical DMSO and three years later was living normally.1
In monkeys, dogs, rats, gerbils, and mice (where unlike humans, DMSO can be tested in experimentally induced neurologic injury), DMSO consistently shrank or prevented the brain damage from blocked arteries, protected the surrounding “penumbra” tissue so it did not die, reduced brain swelling and blood-brain barrier breakdown, blocked the injury that occurs when blood flow returns, extended the window in which treatment could still work (e.g., to six hours in dogs), reduced mortality, and restored brain electrical activity, frequently outperforming the therapies it was compared against (e.g., hyperbaric oxygen, hemodilution, dexamethasone, and barbiturates). Hundreds of additional studies where DMSO was used to deliver another agent (e.g., curcumin or resveratrol) showed the same protective pattern.1
Note: because DMSO is an effective and non-toxic solvent, it is routinely used in experiments to deliver other therapeutic agents. These studies typically assume DMSO is inert (so DMSO alone serves as the “control” and is rarely tested against saline). Collectively, these combination studies tend to yield results similar to those of DMSO alone, and when DMSO is occasionally tested against saline, it often independently produces the therapeutic effect attributed to the tested agent (something the authors sometimes acknowledged,1,2 but in other cases could only be discerned from the study data1). Beyond providing a separate body of evidence corroborating DMSO’s efficacy, I believe this also accounts for why many preclinical studies fail to replicate in clinical trials, as by that stage DMSO (which both potentiates the tested agent and is therapeutic in its own right) is typically no longer used. Replication failure is a major problem science has unsuccessfully contended with for decades.
I hence listed these combination studies in the four-part DMSO series, both for the corroboration they provide and to give additional options to individuals dealing with the conditions described here (as DMSO commonly works even better with another therapeutic agent). Within those studies, curcumin and resveratrol are by far the most frequent combinations (improving nearly every condition covered in the series), followed by melatonin, sulforaphane, quercetin, ginkgo biloba and its ginkgolides, tanshinone IIA, baicalin, the ginsenosides, paeoniflorin, astaxanthin, tetramethylpyrazine, triptolide, berberine, astragaloside IV, icariin, thymoquinone, carvacrol, luteolin, ursolic acid, EGCG, and fisetin (along with hundreds of other natural and pharmaceutical agents).
Many readers, in turn, have reported DMSO resolving a stroke on the way to the hospital, often leaving the ER unable to find evidence one had occurred (e.g., “The ER doc came in to tell me that I had not stroked, despite speech impairment and other signs. I told him I took DMSO”),1,2 a medicinal chemist who drank DMSO as his stroke began credited it with preserving his ability to move and was back to full-time work six weeks later,1 and many others have reported substantial recoveries from established strokes (e.g., a husband partially paralyzed by a stroke was playing guitar and singing while standing with one foot on a chair three months later).1
Note: DMSO’s ability to protect the brain from losing its blood supply is mirrored in the heart (which is similarly sensitive to this). Across roughly 390 studies, DMSO reduced the size of heart attacks (e.g., from 50% to 21% in rats1), essentially eliminated bleeding within the heart muscle after them (0 of 8 pigs versus 7 of 7 controls1), raised the output of damaged hearts,1 prevented scarring, and drove stem cells to become heart muscle,1 while several readers reported using it to stop heart attacks1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (and others noticed large drops in blood pressure, in one case from 148/90 to 109/70 within 30 minutes of a small oral dose1). Likewise, roughly 145 studies and 90 reader reports show DMSO’s circulatory effects treat conditions such as varicose veins, blood clots, Raynaud’s, and non-healing ulcers (e.g., Stanley Jacob found half of Raynaud’s patients had their symptoms eliminated,1 one study of hundreds of diabetic ulcer patients reported a greater than 94% success rate,1 and one reader who sprayed DMSO on her varicose veins nightly reported that “in 13 months they are entirely gone”).1 These are discussed further here.
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[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
A concise guide to the thousands of forgotten studies showing how one simple compound treats strokes, paralysis, neurodegeneration, and nerve pain
Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is a simple, inexpensive compound found throughout nature whose remarkable properties allow it both to treat a wide range of illnesses and to facilitate the use of many different (FDA approved) medical therapies. Yet, it exists in a strange limbo: it is one of the most extensively studied and used medicinal compounds, but most mainstream sources insist there’s no evidence it works for anything beyond its single FDA-approved use, interstitial cystitis, despite the fact that physicians and scientists, seeing its promise, independently conducted tens of thousands of studies demonstrating its therapeutic utility and that DMSO, on the basis of that data, is widely used in foreign medical systems.
DMSO’s peculiar status results from the fact it cannot be profited off of (e.g., a twenty dollar bottle will last a user for months). Because of this, there has been no incentive within the medical field to secure a costly approval for it within the FDA’s “pay-to-play system.” Rather, the FDA went to war against DMSO for decades (despite immense public protest to legalize DMSO) and as a result, almost all of the approved DMSO preparations on the market are DMSO pharmaceutical combinations (as they can be patented and then marked up). Likewise, there was no incentive within the natural health field to market it as a supplement, which has resulted in it becoming mostly forgotten by the time a 1994 law took away the FDA’s ability to restrict natural supplements like DMSO.
I find this egregious, as DMSO is able to:
•Treat a variety of common conditions (e.g., pain and injuries) in a dramatically effective, cheaper, and most importantly safer manner than the existing therapeutic options.
•Treat a variety of challenging and tragic illnesses that have few or no treatment options, in many cases producing recoveries so dramatic they are regarded as “miraculous” or “impossible.”
Since many of DMSO’s most incredible effects are seen with neurological disorders (that often otherwise lack satisfactory treatment options), a significant portion of the DMSO literature base has focused on this area. So, over the last six months, in an effort to make this option available to people, I’ve tried to concisely summarize approximately 4,500 studies and 1,000 reader reports of DMSO’s utility for neurological conditions. Unfortunately, given how much information this was, despite my absolute best efforts to compress it, the four articles I wrote1,2,3,4 still totaled to 142,000 words. However, now that those four have been done (which I felt had to be done first as many of the claims I’ve made seem impossible within the conventional framework), it is possible to write a much shorter (and more accessible) summary of the DMSO’s uses in neurology which can link back to the more detailed pieces which provide all the corroborating references one might need before considering trying DMSO.
How DMSO Works
James Miller, MD: It is my impression, with no hard data, that ~80% of everything people see neurologists for goes away with DMSO. That is what my patients reflect back to me who choose to trial DMSO for their neurological problems.
DMSO’s unique ability to treat a very wide range of seemingly unrelated disorders makes it critical to understand how this happens, both because skeptical parties require mechanistic plausibility to accept that it can work, and because DMSO’s ability to treat so many challenging illnesses suggests whatever it does addresses the foundational causes of disease medicine, despite its best efforts, has not been able to identify. DMSO’s mechanisms, in turn, break down into three categories: the conventionally recognized ones (with wide support in the literature), the documented but overlooked ones, and the mostly-unrecognized “alternative” ones (which have some supporting literature) that I believe underlie many diseases.
Since many of DMSO’s therapeutic effects are uniquely tailored to the needs of the nervous system, in those four articles (which began the second draft of the DMSO series), I laid out extensive body of research demonstrating those therapeutic mechanisms. They are as follows:
Widely Recognized Mechanisms
- Protecting cells from otherwise lethal stressors. DMSO made modern cryopreservation possible. The same protection extends to radiation, excitotoxins, heavy metals, nerve agents, heat, and loss of blood supply. It works partly by neutralizing the free radicals these stressors generate, stabilizing cell membranes, preventing the calcium influx that triggers cell death, and sustaining ATP production when mitochondria are compromised. CNS Neurons are among the most injury-sensitive and least regenerative cells in the body, so this is particularly valuable for the nervous system, particularly since many neurodegenerative disorders are caused by a continual source of neurotoxic stressors that gradually destroy nervous tissue (detailed here and here).
- Neutralizing free radicals and inflammation. Chronic inflammation is one of the most common drivers of neurological disease, and in our experience DMSO is one of the most effective anti-inflammatories available. Beyond being one of the most potent known hydroxyl radical scavengers (e.g., there are 135,000 results on Google Scholar for “DMSO radical scavenger”1), DMSO suppresses NF-κB—the master switch that turns on inflammatory cytokines (e.g., in one endotoxin model, it cut ICAM-1, TNF-α, and neutrophil infiltration by roughly 80%1), reduces the adhesion molecules that allow white blood cells to plug vessel walls and infiltrate tissue, inhibits inflammatory prostaglandins, reduces edema, and restores the circulation whose absence allows inflammation to persist. Unlike steroids and other immunosuppressants, however, it modulates rather than shuts down the immune system (while also potentiating cortisol so lower steroid doses can be used) (detailed here and here).
- Crossing the blood-brain barrier and carrying other agents with it. Within five minutes of skin application, DMSO reaches the bloodstream, and within an hour it has spread throughout the body (including into the bones), yet it does not accumulate, since 85% is excreted within 24 hours. The blood-brain barrier keeps most therapeutic agents out of the brain (often requiring very high doses so that some reaches it), but DMSO both crosses it and carries other agents across with it. This allows therapies to reach the central nervous system at much lower (and hence less toxic) doses than would otherwise be required (detailed here).
- Relieving pain. DMSO reduces pain transmission, relaxes muscles, reduces swelling and inflammation (addressing key sources of pain), and potentiates local anesthetics—which is why pain reduction was DMSO’s most popular use from the start (detailed here).
Note: muscles compressing nerves contributes to many neurological issues.
Documented but Overlooked Mechanisms
- Inhibiting blood clotting. Neurons are among the tissues most sensitive to losing their blood supply (often ceasing to function the moment it is interrupted), so even small clots can cause significant neurological damage. A large body of research shows DMSO counteracts clotting through several independent pathways at once. It inhibits platelet aggregation and activation, selectively inhibits COX-1 and thromboxane A₂, raises cAMP and cGMP, scavenges the free radicals that trigger platelet activation, suppresses tissue factor (the protein that initiates the clotting cascade), and activates the body’s natural clot-dissolving system, allowing it to break down existing clots as well as prevent new ones (e.g., in rats with injured carotid arteries, IV DMSO virtually abolished clot formation1). Because DMSO normalizes coagulation rather than forcefully blocking a single pathway, its bleeding risk is much lower than that of conventional blood thinners (detailed here).
- Increasing circulation and reducing swelling. DMSO dilates blood vessels, stimulates lymphatic flow, and by neutralizing the free radicals that constrict vessels and impair nitric oxide, keeps them open under oxidative stress. It also acts as a targeted diuretic that reduces the swelling that compresses injured brain and spinal tissue (e.g., one veterinary review found it lowered pressure inside the skull faster than mannitol1). Unlike conventional treatments for brain swelling, which often lower blood pressure and thereby reduce the brain’s blood supply, DMSO relieves the pressure while increasing blood flow to the brain (detailed here and here).
Note: many neurodegenerative diseases appear to stem in part from impaired venous and lymphatic drainage from the brain, which traps toxins and the misfolded proteins that accumulate in these diseases (e.g., surgically restoring that drainage has produced marked improvements in multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s). Since DMSO increases both venous and lymphatic drainage, it offers a non-invasive way to produce many of the same effects. - Clearing aged blood cells. IV DMSO causes osmotic hemolysis. As this selectively affects aged red blood cells (which happen to be prone to clumping), this hemolysis reduces blood viscosity and increases blood flow (e.g., one dog study showed a greater than 20% increase in cerebral blood flow following this hemolysis1). A leading researcher, in turn, believed this explained the paradoxical observation that IV DMSO lowered hematocrit but raised cerebral blood flow (detailed here).
- Increasing parasympathetic tone. DMSO inhibits acetylcholinesterase, the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine (the primary transmitter of the parasympathetic nervous system). Many practitioners consider excessive sympathetic (fight-or-flight) activity with deficient parasympathetic (rest-and-repair) activity to be a root cause of chronic disease. That imbalance sustains chronic psychological stress and agitation, constricts blood vessels, reduces blood flow to the brain (and other parts of the body), impairs healing, and keeps neural circuits locked in dysfunctional states. By restoring parasympathetic tone, DMSO helps counterbalance this and normalize autonomic function (detailed here).
- Blocking pain at its source and in the central nervous system. Beyond dampening pain signals, DMSO biophysically blocks the small nerve fibers that transmit chronic pain (leaving larger fibers untouched), blocks nerve ion channels much as local anesthetics do, and suppresses the NMDA receptors that drive central sensitization. Partly through scavenging free radicals, it also prevents the sensitization that often follows nerve injury. Finally, it strengthens the body’s own pain-inhibiting circuits and opioid signaling while producing its own opioid-independent pain relief (e.g., comparable to morphine but lasting three times as long1), allowing it to address pain conditions other medications cannot touch (detailed here).
- Repairing and rebuilding nerves. When nerve fibers are cut or crushed, their ruptured membranes must reseal quickly to prevent the cell from dying, and DMSO significantly enhances this resealing, even under conditions that normally impair it. It is also one of the most potent known promoters of microtubule assembly (the internal scaffolding nerves need to regrow—in one case lowering the threshold for it 8- to 10-fold1), and drives stem cells to differentiate into neurons. This provides a mechanistic basis for the nerve and spinal cord regeneration repeatedly observed with it (detailed here and here).
- Acting as a chemical chaperone. DMSO stabilizes proteins in their correct shape and dissolves misfolded aggregates such as amyloid, and breaks down the abnormal tissue of fibrotic contractile disorders (e.g., scleroderma, Dupuytren’s, and Peyronie’s1,2). As these protein aggregates play a key role in many neurodegenerative disorders, this mechanism likely plays a major part in DMSO’s ability to address these disorders (detailed here).
Unrecognized Mechanisms
- Dispersing clumped blood. A large body of research, pioneered first by Western and later by Russian scientists, found that blood cells clumping together (”sludging”) and forming microclots that obstruct the smallest vessels is a root cause of many diseases (mirroring Chinese medicine’s concept of “blood stasis”). This clumping can be triggered by attractive forces (e.g., positive ions or pathologic proteins) or by a loss of the negative charge (zeta potential) that keeps blood cells apart. Infections, vaccines, and the COVID spike protein all cause blood cells to clump, while improving their dispersion frequently produces dramatic improvements across a wide range of ailments, so a significant portion of this newsletter has focused on this forgotten concept (detailed here). In addition to preventing while blood cells from plugging the smallest vessels, DMSO has effects similar to agents that restore zeta potential, but rather than acting electrically, it prevents microclotting by neutralizing the forces that draw blood cells together (e.g., in a 2009 study, heating rats’ cerebrospinal fluid caused escalating microclotting followed by brain damage, all of which DMSO prevented1,2,3). Since the nervous system is exquisitely sensitive to impaired microcirculation, this likely underlies many of DMSO’s benefits for neurological disorders (detailed here).Note: ozone is another marginalized low-cost therapy that a vast body of forgotten literature shows treats a broad range of diseases (many overlapping with DMSO’s). I am currently compiling that literature, and from what I’ve seen, ozone’s ability to reduce red blood cell adhesion appears to be one of the core mechanisms behind its broad therapeutic activity.
- Restoring the blood flow the brain loses to chronic stress. A multi-decade Russian research program found that chronic stress drops cerebral blood flow from roughly 50 to under 30 ml/100g/min, setting off the degenerative changes seen in “stress” and psychiatric illness. Oral DMSO, particularly when combined with vitamin E, was the most effective intervention they tested (detailed here).
- Resetting cellular structure. DMSO binds water more strongly than water binds to itself, and at cell membranes, it pulls water away from their surface. At lower concentrations, this tightens and stabilizes the membrane, while at higher concentrations it opens temporary pores. Both effects reverse as DMSO diffuses away, which is what allows it to carry substances across membranes without damaging them and to protect cells during freezing. A similar reversible process occurs within the cell’s internal skeleton (e.g., within 20 to 30 minutes, DMSO drives actin from the cytoplasm into the nucleus, and once DMSO diffuses out, the cell’s normal structure is restored within 1 to 2 hours1,2). Critically, when these structures reform, they appear to do so in a healthier configuration, with DMSO strengthening normal cellular architecture while breaking down pathological configurations (e.g., those in cancer cells). Many chronic conditions stem from pathological nerve circuits that can be “reset” with a short-acting local anesthetic, so this may explain why DMSO produces similar benefits (detailed here).
- Reviving dormant cells. Injured tissue frequently enters a dormant “penumbra” state (resembling the cell danger response) where it stops functioning but has not yet died, and it can remain that way for years before either recovering or dying. Across the body, studies and patient reports indicate DMSO can reawaken these dormant cells (e.g., one leading DMSO researcher repeatedly found that animals with flatlined EEGs regained brain activity within about ten minutes of receiving DMSO1). I suspect this results from a combination of DMSO restoring microcirculation (and clearing trapped cellular waste), sustaining cellular energy production, resetting cellular structure (and neuronal firing), and stabilizing microtubules, while also blunting the burst of free radicals that occurs when blood flow returns to oxygen-starved tissue. Neurons readily enter this state (e.g., the penumbra surrounding a stroke is a well-recognized concept in conventional neurology), so this property likely plays a key role in DMSO’s remarkable ability to treat neurological disorders and suddenly bring “long dead” tissue or lost neurological function back to life (detailed here).
With this context in mind, let’s now review what the data (and many corroborating reader reports) show DMSO does for a wide range of neurological disorders.
Note: for the majority of the conditions described below, I located and summarized at least 100 studies supporting the use of DMSO for them in the longer articles.
Strokes
Roughly 800,000 Americans have a stroke each year, and despite immense efforts to improve outcomes, strokes remain a leading cause of death and disability. This is largely because clot-busting tPA, the only approved drug for ischemic strokes, cannot be given until a CT scan rules out a brain bleed (so treatment is typically delayed by hours as brain tissue continues to die), reaches only a small fraction of patients within its window, meaningfully benefits about 13% of those who receive it,1 and carries a 6.4% risk of a symptomatic brain bleed.1 After a stroke, there is also essentially no therapy that restores lost function. DMSO sidesteps each of these problems, as it treats ischemic strokes, partially treats hemorrhagic ones, has no known risk of worsening a bleed, can be given at home or in an ambulance, and protects and revives the brain tissue a stroke would otherwise destroy. For this reason, one of my primary goals has been to raise awareness of DMSO for strokes and move toward emergency services (or patients at home) giving it immediately while the standard workup proceeds (since some bleeds require emergency neurosurgery).
Supporting this are hundreds of studies (most in animals, plus a large number where DMSO was combined with another agent), with the human ones including the following:
- In a 2002 trial of 11 ischemic stroke patients, IV DMSO (with fructose diphosphate) left 63% “improved” or “markedly improved” at three months, versus 20% on standard care, and the benefit held even when treatment began well after the stroke.1
- In 100 Chilean patients with cerebrovascular disease, DMSO accelerated recovery from hemiplegia and aphasia.1,2
- In 127 elderly patients with cerebrovascular disorders, DMSO iontophoresis produced clinical improvement in 86% by the fifth session (versus delayed improvement with standard care).1
- In 250 patients with cerebrovascular disease, DMSO iontophoresis (with vinpocetine) stabilized cerebral blood flow and improved blood supply to the large cerebral arteries.1,2
- In three newborns with perinatal hypoxic brain injury, DMSO-vitamin E electrophoresis normalized muscle tone and reflexes faster than standard care.1
Stanley Jacob (the physician who pioneered the research into DMSO) considered DMSO so important for strokes that he gave patients home stroke kits so they could inject it themselves the moment symptoms began, and a 1992 review concluded DMSO outperformed mannitol, dexamethasone, and barbiturates as a neuroprotectant for strokes.1
Note: many profound stroke recoveries exist within the DMSO literature. For example, one author reported that a teacher found unconscious after a major stroke was treated with DMSO at home within minutes and was back teaching with no disability when school resumed after the Christmas break, while a woman who had been in a coma for three months after her stroke began responding a month after starting topical DMSO and three years later was living normally.1
In monkeys, dogs, rats, gerbils, and mice (where unlike humans, DMSO can be tested in experimentally induced neurologic injury), DMSO consistently shrank or prevented the brain damage from blocked arteries, protected the surrounding “penumbra” tissue so it did not die, reduced brain swelling and blood-brain barrier breakdown, blocked the injury that occurs when blood flow returns, extended the window in which treatment could still work (e.g., to six hours in dogs), reduced mortality, and restored brain electrical activity, frequently outperforming the therapies it was compared against (e.g., hyperbaric oxygen, hemodilution, dexamethasone, and barbiturates). Hundreds of additional studies where DMSO was used to deliver another agent (e.g., curcumin or resveratrol) showed the same protective pattern.1
Note: because DMSO is an effective and non-toxic solvent, it is routinely used in experiments to deliver other therapeutic agents. These studies typically assume DMSO is inert (so DMSO alone serves as the “control” and is rarely tested against saline). Collectively, these combination studies tend to yield results similar to those of DMSO alone, and when DMSO is occasionally tested against saline, it often independently produces the therapeutic effect attributed to the tested agent (something the authors sometimes acknowledged,1,2 but in other cases could only be discerned from the study data1). Beyond providing a separate body of evidence corroborating DMSO’s efficacy, I believe this also accounts for why many preclinical studies fail to replicate in clinical trials, as by that stage DMSO (which both potentiates the tested agent and is therapeutic in its own right) is typically no longer used. Replication failure is a major problem science has unsuccessfully contended with for decades.
I hence listed these combination studies in the four-part DMSO series, both for the corroboration they provide and to give additional options to individuals dealing with the conditions described here (as DMSO commonly works even better with another therapeutic agent). Within those studies, curcumin and resveratrol are by far the most frequent combinations (improving nearly every condition covered in the series), followed by melatonin, sulforaphane, quercetin, ginkgo biloba and its ginkgolides, tanshinone IIA, baicalin, the ginsenosides, paeoniflorin, astaxanthin, tetramethylpyrazine, triptolide, berberine, astragaloside IV, icariin, thymoquinone, carvacrol, luteolin, ursolic acid, EGCG, and fisetin (along with hundreds of other natural and pharmaceutical agents).
Many readers, in turn, have reported DMSO resolving a stroke on the way to the hospital, often leaving the ER unable to find evidence one had occurred (e.g., “The ER doc came in to tell me that I had not stroked, despite speech impairment and other signs. I told him I took DMSO”),1,2 a medicinal chemist who drank DMSO as his stroke began credited it with preserving his ability to move and was back to full-time work six weeks later,1 and many others have reported substantial recoveries from established strokes (e.g., a husband partially paralyzed by a stroke was playing guitar and singing while standing with one foot on a chair three months later).1
Note: DMSO’s ability to protect the brain from losing its blood supply is mirrored in the heart (which is similarly sensitive to this). Across roughly 390 studies, DMSO reduced the size of heart attacks (e.g., from 50% to 21% in rats1), essentially eliminated bleeding within the heart muscle after them (0 of 8 pigs versus 7 of 7 controls1), raised the output of damaged hearts,1 prevented scarring, and drove stem cells to become heart muscle,1 while several readers reported using it to stop heart attacks1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (and others noticed large drops in blood pressure, in one case from 148/90 to 109/70 within 30 minutes of a small oral dose1). Likewise, roughly 145 studies and 90 reader reports show DMSO’s circulatory effects treat conditions such as varicose veins, blood clots, Raynaud’s, and non-healing ulcers (e.g., Stanley Jacob found half of Raynaud’s patients had their symptoms eliminated,1 one study of hundreds of diabetic ulcer patients reported a greater than 94% success rate,1 and one reader who sprayed DMSO on her varicose veins nightly reported that “in 13 months they are entirely gone”).1 These are discussed further here.
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[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
