The Magic of DMSO

My personal experience

Disclaimer: I write about my personal experiences, and what works for me may not work for you. I have no healthcare training, but I’ve been reading passionately on healthcare since being diagnosed with melanoma in early 2004 (which gave me a 50% chance of being alive by 2009, and the odds were not supposed to improve thereafter). I beat those odds by gaining my own education from published researchers, rather than relying upon my dermatologist’s education (which is more geared toward understanding how to maximize how much insurance will reimburse him for his time). If you are on any sort of prescription medication, ALWAYS check with your doctor before trying any substance that could interact with them. Or, better yet, ALWAYS take responsibility for your own chronic health problems!

I have recently found myself frequently providing comments on various author’s Substacks regarding how DMSO has helped me, my wife, our friends and our dog, to which I at times get questions for more specific information. So I finally decided it was time to record all these thoughts and experiences in one place, where I can add to them over time, if appropriate. That way I can simply reply to people with DMSO questions by referring them to this page.

I first learned about DMSO around 2021 or so from Dr. John Bergman, DC (though I have never met him, he literally saved my life, so I hold him in the very highest esteem). My further education on the topic started with reading Amanda Vollmer’s book, Healing with DMSO (2020) and The DMSO Handbook for Doctors (2013) by Helmut Fischer. But it took a Substack series on the topic by A Midwestern Doctor in his The Forgotten Side of Medicine before I witnessed my first DMSO miracle. At which point, I promptly became a disciple of both AMD and DMSO.

NOTE: It is ESSENTIAL to read any of the above references to learn about the few necessary caveats to using DMSO. It is incredibly safe, effective and cheap, when you understand how it works. For instance, it has properties that can be problematic in the presence of environmental toxins. Ladies, think make-up here, or things like cleaning products. Guys, think about grease from working on your car, pesticides used for lawn care, or that cheap aftershave your daughter gave you for Christmas, etc. You don’t want DMSO making it easier for crap like that to get sucked into your body! Bad things are virtually guaranteed to happen.

Vestibular Problems and TIAs

During the winter of 2021/2022, our then 13-year-old dog, Lana, experienced an acute health crisis. She became very unbalanced and wobbly, lost some of her hearing and eyesight, and seemed to be experiencing a cascade of additional minor health problems. The vet diagnosed the primary problem as a vestibular issue - an inner ear problem that affects balance. We were told the cause is idiopathic (Latin Doctorspeak for “of an unknown origin”) and that it would either get better or get worse.

My wife is a retired registered nurse, and she had thought that, prior to the big vestibular event, Lana seemed to be experiencing increasingly frequent, but short, trans ischemic attacks (TIAs), which are mini-strokes. It was a short while later when one of A Midwestern Doctor’s (AMD’s) posts mentioned that DMSO applied to the carotid arteries of your neck can stop a stroke in seconds. My wife, with 40 years of nursing experience, was highly skeptical. If that was possible, why had she not heard of it? And how dangerous is this DMSO stuff anyway? You’ll find the answers to those questions in AMD’s Substack (short answer to the latter: not very, when you know how it works).

When Lana would have a TIA, for a while later she would experience these odd, repetitive eye movement patterns. Some would resolve in a few minutes, some would go on for an alarmingly long time. During one such episode we rubbed a small amount of rose scented 70% DMSO/30% aloe vera on her belly (the easiest access to skin on most dogs). In seconds, the eye movements stopped! Since then, we’ve made it a daily routine to rub a small amount of DMSO on her belly, and she has not had a TIA since (at least not that we’ve seen). Prior to DMSO, she had more than a dozen TIAs that we noticed, and probably quite a few more that went unnoticed. Things had gotten so bad, that we thought sure she had started the process of circling the drain, and that she’d be leaving us before long. I’m writing this nearly two years later.

Lana in September 2024 in our Camp Inn teardrop camper, during one of her many cross country trips (she is remarkably well traveled for a dog).

I now apply a small amount of DMSO cream to my carotids most mornings, as a cheap form of stroke insurance. Doing so has improved my mental clarity and reduced my skin dryness.

Silky Coat/Hair

In late 2024, Lana experience an acute loss of additional vision. We suspect that she now has virtually no vision in her left eye, and mainly navigates based on blurry light and contrast that is discernible solely with her right eye. She does well with direct overhead lighting; she struggles in low light during the evening. And also in bright, reflected light (from, for instance, a low sun angle reflecting off the sidewalk), which can blind her perception of contrast. It was in the latter conditions when one day we were out for a walk. We crossed the street and she walked directly into the tire of a parked Mercedes Benz! You can’t get much better contrast than a black Benz on a sunny day! That’s when I learned that she was not the only one who had to learn to adapt to her new limitations. I now steer her with her lead, to keep her from running into things. We thought it likely the additional loss of vision was due to a TIA that we had not witnessed (which I believe was related to getting an update of the rabies vaccine - her initial vestibular problems had also started not long after receiving a vaccine).¹

Since we were already doing the daily DMSO cream routine, we scratched our heads, wondering what else to do? We decided to try adding a few drops of 100% DMSO to her food. For years, we had been giving her daily salmon oil, to help keep her coat shiny, but despite the effort, her fur was dry and brittle. Within three days of starting the DMSO drops, it was clear that her coat was rapidly becoming softer and silkier. Today, it is silkier than at any point since we’ve had her! And she has not had another TIA since adding this routine. We’re also finding a lot less dog hair when we vacuum the house every week.

I shared the above anecdote in a Substack comment, and a woman replied that she was going to start taking a few drops of DMSO every day to see if it would help her hair. What if there is no need for conditioner or fancy hair routines in order to have soft, silky hair later in life? Who wouldn’t welcome even the tiniest improvement in health?

Gout

One day about a year ago, my wife awoke to sharp pain in one of her thumb joints and soon recognized it as gout. She tried all of her acquired medical magic on it, to no avail. She then finally told me about it and asked what I would recommend? I said she should try rubbing DMSO cream on it a few times per day, and see what happens. Within three days the pain completely resolved. She now takes a daily tart cherry supplement to avoid recurrence, and she remains gout-free.

Back and Knee Pain

One of my wife’s early life experiences was in college, where for ROTC she repeatedly jumped out of a perfectly good airplane in the skies above Florida. Unfortunately, she had one bad landing, which resulted in a lifetime of problems and pain. In 2023, things had become bad enough that she feared that she would soon lose her mobility, and likely face the remaining years of her life in chronic, debilitating pain. That’s the problem from having been a nurse, she clearly understood the negative trajectory that she was on. So, what to do?

In her forty years in healthcare, my wife had access to far more resources for dealing with her back problem than the average patient. She worked with a world class cancer research doc at one point in her career at a large university medical center (where she was unofficially the dubbed the local prostate queen), so there were lots of resources to possibly find someone with the unique knowledge to help with her specific problem.

But all her efforts netted only a recommendation for back surgery (which almost everyone recommended to put off AS LONG AS POSSIBLE),² and a willingness to write her a prescription for every new pain med that happened along. She mostly got by on NSAIDS, and had the best luck with Vioxx, before it was pulled from the market. Most recently, she had been using Diclofenac. Fortunately for her, she cannot tolerate narcotics, or who knows where we would be now if she had headed down that path? Nobody ever suggested that she see a chiropractor (since all competitors to allopaths are derisively called quacks).

Of our own efforts at finding a solution to her problem, we discovered chiropractic care while wintering in Florida one season. It didn’t fix the problem, but the pain became less severe and more manageable. And a few other minor health problems got resolved in the process.

We returned home, where we found a local chiropractor who was also a functional med doc, so we sought his opinion on what else to do. He would do adjustments now and then, but mainly relied upon acupuncture and frequency specific microcurrent (FSM) to keep the pain under control. When he first looked at an x-ray of her back, he was surprised that she wasn’t in constant, intractable pain, as there was hardly any disc visible! He was not at all hopeful that her 50-year-old injury could be healed. At best, he would help delay the inevitable.

Then AMD wrote a post about the Cell Danger Response (CDR): how the body will put cells into a hibernation phase during acute stress, when there are insufficient resources to maintain all cells, and that certain nutrients are needed to wake them back up. I soon found a case study about urolithin A helping to resolve the CDR for an unrelated back malady. Nothing implied it could help her damaged disc, but at least it had worked on a different problem in the same general neighborhood. Around the same time, my wife began using DMSO cream on her back, together with a jade and tourmaline infrared heating pad. Things quickly improved to where she very rarely needed any NSAIDs. Was it the urolithin A, or the DMSO, or the heating pad, or any two of them, or all three? Placebo effect? Just blind luck? There’s no way to know. We are simply thankful that this ritual somehow seems to have worked.

Our doc was amazed, and thought it indicated that there actually was some healing going on. So, on his recommendation, we followed that up with prolozone therapy³ and platelet rich plasma treatment, both of which are intended to encourage further healing. Right now, her back is in better shape than it has been in decades, and she is off pain meds for the first time in 30 years. She still has limitations and has to be mindful to not cause things to regress. In the future we may also consider stem cell therapy, but for now she is happy with enjoying more health than she did twenty years ago. At some point we’ll likely get an x-ray to see how things look, but since x-rays have their own health risks, we are in no hurry to do so.

Recently, a friend in Texas also started using DMSO cream to see if it would help his decades-old knee pain, and was very excited that it was helping! This turned out to be only temporary relief (for a couple of months), probably because it improved his circulation for a while.

Vascular Circulation & Varicose Veins

My sister, who is two years older than me, has a LOT of vascular issues and has relied upon traditional treatments for relief (vein stripping and drugs). I, on the other hand, have a severe allergy to allopaths,⁴ resulting from too few positive encounters with them during the past seven decades of my life. So I always seek out books that others have written on a health topic, and/or the advice of my functional medicine doctor. I rely upon MDs (Medieval Doctors) only as a last resort (except for trauma, which is where they are phenomenally skilled - they only suck at chronic health problems).⁵

In 2023, I had developed acrocyanosis in both feet, which basically means they would turn purple if I sat too long: a clear sign my circulation was in bad shape. I suspect this was part of the cascade of health issues I experienced that started with severe heart issues in late 2018, about which I will write in a future post. There’s little doubt in my mind that an MD would have instantly had me on blood thinners for life. But I prefer to let my body heal itself, and went looking for other options.

One of AMD’s posts claimed that one of DMSO’s many properties was its ability to dissolve blood agglutination, which was likely part of my acrocyanosis. Essentially, red blood cells in unhealthy people can stick to one another like a stack of Frisbees, which are termed rouleaux. The rouleaux gum up your capillaries and block circulation, which is not good. I tried DMSO for a while and it seemed to help, but I needed to be very religious about applying it. So it was more like symptom relief, than actually fixing the underlying problem (which was, like ALL chronic disease, multi-factorial). When I did use DMSO consistently, it would resolve a varicose vein on the back of my left knee, but once I’d declare to myself “problem solved!” and moved on, it would eventually return.

According to several sources, there are at least a couple of things that can help clear out veins and arteries from all the damage done to them over the course of a lifetime. Those include nattokinase (an enzyme derived from fermented soy) and bromelain (an enzyme from pineapple and other fruits). Once I started taking nattokinase, my left knee varicose vein resolved, without the need for regular DMSO applications. It seems to be helping with the acrocyanosis (I’m writing this is winter, and it is easier to notice in the summer when I don’t wear socks). I’ve heard that it can take a year of nattokinase supplementation to really make a difference, and at present I’ve been using it for a couple of months. I don’t supplement with bromelain, because I make it a habit to eat pineapple whenever I eat steak. I have weak digestion, and the pineapple helps break down the steak proteins, resulting in more complete digestion.

Cherry Angioma

I had developed a small cherry angioma (a small red spot) on my face. My dermatologist didn’t offer any suggestions, though he likely would have been happy to cut it out. It completely resolved after several DMSO applications and has not returned more than a year later. A half-hearted attempt at doing the same to a larger cherry angioma on my chest has not been successful, suggesting that this treatment might be more effective on newly formed angiomas.

Tendonitis

My wife recently experienced tendonitis on the back of her left hand. DMSO plus immobilizing her wrist helped to reduce the pain and give her body the time needed to heal naturally.

While this helped initially, it didn’t solve the problem. We tried using ozonated oils on it, which helped, but required constant application. She was eventually given ozone injections by our functional medicine doctor, which has greatly improved the problem (as of late April 2025).

DMSO Sources

AMD has lots of recommendations about the best sources of DMSO (which are NOT found in your local tractor supply store). Check out his posts for more detail. We use three different products (AMD recommends products 1 and 3):

1. Nature’s Gift rose scented 70% DMSO/30 % aloe vera cream. By far, we use this product the most. DMSO has a natural garlic/sulfur smell, and this is the only product I’ve found that avoids that issue. A little bit goes a long way, and the aloe vera is great for your skin.

2. Heiltropfen DMSO and Magnesium Oil. This comes with a dropper for dispensing. It is what Lana gets in her food, and which I use from time to time. Nearly everyone is magnesium deficient,⁶ despite what your blood work might say. Your body keeps blood magnesium levels in a very tight range, correcting deficiencies by stealing extra from cells when necessary. If your bloodwork shows you are magnesium deficient, you are in a serious health crisis, or soon will be. More than likely, you’ll die of a heart attack before this shows up in your lab results. Blood magnesium is a worthless metric for disease prevention. If you ever perceive your heart pounding (except when you are doing some insane level of aerobic exercise), consider learning about magnesium. Get enough magnesium onboard and your heartbeats will soften, and you’ll likely see your blood pressure improve (so be careful if you are on prescription BP meds!). You’ll likely sleep better as well.

3. DMSO Store 100% DMSO. The only downside to this product is that they don’t give you a dropper with the bottle. Either figure out what size dropper fits the size of bottle you purchase, or transfer some to a small dropper bottle for dispensing. Though there are folks who regularly take spoonfuls of DMSO, so a dropper isn’t always necessary.

MY STANDARD ADVICE for triangulating the truth:

BEWARE OF THE BENEVOLENCE OF BILLIONAIRES:
Most billionaires become such by exploiting you, not by thinking of your best interests. Viewing the world through this lens can literally save your life!

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Revision History

23 Apr 2025: Added a second sentence to the last paragraph under the Back and Knee Pain heading.

23 Apr 2025: Added a second paragraph under the Tendonitis heading.

1. What? Vaccines can be harmful? I know that to most people this is heresy, but see Christopher Exley’s Substack on aluminum for at least one reason why the vaccines could have caused harm. Then decide for yourself.

2. Fantastic advice!

3. I believe this is done in case some part of her pain might have been caused by a problem with the fascia. Since allopaths ignore anything they don’t understand - like fascia - this is deemed by them to be quackery. Their use of the term quackery is a testament to their profound ignorance about far too many things.

4. Not everyone is familiar with the term allopath. Allopathic medicine is a flavor of medicine (drugs and surgery) practiced by MDs. ODs practice osteopathic medicine, DCs practice chiropractic medicine, OMDs practice a form of Chinese medicine, etc. It’s pretty much just allopathic and osteopathic medical treatment that insurance will reimburse for (osteopaths have largely been co-opted into the allopathic fold).

5. MDs are cheaper in the short term, because insurance will reimburse for selected treatments, but you generally only get temporary symptom relief. And if you are prescribed drugs for symptom management, they sometimes result in new diseases that need to be treated (kind of like what would happen if you hired an arsonist to work for the fire department). The others are more expensive in the short term (insurance won’t reimburse for them, because the goal of insurance is to maintain the allopathic near monopoly on healthcare), but you are much more likely to get far longer-lasting relief, and will often find that other health issues mysteriously disappear as a result.

6. I recommend this book published in 2011 by Dr. Mark Sircus (you can find cheap used copies on eBay).