Early Health Innovators and DMSO

One of the things I never cease to be amazed by is how cyclical history is, and how similar many situations we find ourselves in now are to ones I’ve read about far in the past. Over the last six months, I have been attempting to compile (almost) every medically relevant paper ever written on DMSO, and in that process, skimmed through hundreds of thousands of search results (which were filtered from millions of hits) to flag each study I needed to sort and summarize, which with the help of AI, resulted in this:

From that process, I came across many papers detailing the history of DMSO, and while many essentially retold parts of the story in Pat McGrady’s book (The Persecuted Drug: The Story of DMSO), many also contained things I never expected to come across. For example, I remember in the 1980s that gas stations would have signs saying “we sell DMSO,” but try as I might, I could never find a picture to prove this. However, during that project, I eventually found this in a 1982 article, which, while not a gas station, was pretty close:

Of these, papers on the history of DMSO, one caught my eye as it contained numerous lessons which hold just as true now as they did more than forty years ago.

A Brief History of DMSO

DMSO is a naturally occurring substance that is found throughout nature and routinely studied in climate research as it forms a core part of the sulfur cycle many microbial organisms rely upon. Discovered in 1866 by a Russian chemist, it was mostly forgotten until the 1950s, when an emerging need for new chemical solvents prompted the paper industry to meet that demand by oxidizing the dimethyl sulfide (DMS) wood pulping produced into DMSO.
Note: the cycle between DMS, DMSO, and DMSO₂, beyond underlying many critical ecological processes, also explains why DMSO causes some users to experience an odor, and will be the focus of a future article (but in the meantime, an abridged version on how to reduce the odor some DMSO users experience can be read here). Fenbendazole & Ivermec... Kerrington, Andrew Check Amazon for Pricing.

Before long, one pulp and paper company, Crown Zellerbach, was the primary producer of DMSO, and assigned a chemist to see if there were other uses for the tree solvents they produced. Herschler accidentally discovered that DMSO could carry dyes into the skin, and also quickly realized the immense value of this with antibiotics and antifungals to treat infections normal medications could not reach. Serendipitously, Stanley Jacob, a renowned surgeon at the nearby Oregon medical school had been searching for a way to cryopreserve organs that would be transplanted, and had recently come across a revolutionary study suggesting DMSO could function as an effective cryoprotective agent.

So, when Herschler, in 1961 shared his discovery with Jacob, Jacob enthusiastically explored it, and after tasting iodine shortly after mixing topical DMSO with it, realized this drug rapidly facilitated systemic absorption, revolutionizing pharmacology. Shortly after, they discovered it rapidly treated burns, then sprains, and then a wide range of musculoskeletal issues and before long, Jacob started carrying it on him to address whatever ailment someone he ran into had (with DMSO often working). These remarkable cures inspired Jacob to invest his career, personal time (despite having a family) and savings into DMSO research, and then remarkably, once he was broke, his dean agreed to have the medical school fund his research.
Note: once DMSO began being used in a medical context, the pulp production method was abandoned as it could not produce DMSO pure enough for medical applications.

The results Jacob got attracted immense attention, and before long, numerous pharmaceutical companies had heavily invested in studying DMSO, while in parallel, the media (e.g., The New York Times) widely promoted it (e.g., a 1965 NYT editorial called it “the nearest thing to a wonder drug the nineteen-sixties have produced”) and DMSO quickly became the most demanded drug in America. Initially, the FDA was extremely open and supportive of this, but due to the public outcry over the thalidomide disaster Dr. Kelsey prevented (which caused Congress, in 1962, to grant the FDA strict regulatory powers), the FDA switched to needing “well-controlled” evidence of drug efficacy they would meticulously evaluate for a drug to be approved.

Before long, due to just how many different uses DMSO has (each of which drug companies were applying to receive approval for), this became a major issue:

‘ ‘The FDA representatives [in 1964] seemed anxious to do everything possible to permit further testing of DMSO,” Jacob told me later. “They pointed out that DMSO was a very versatile drug; and because of this they were a little apprehensive as to how many IND applications might be filed to test not only DMSO alone but DMSO in combination with various other pharmacologically active substances. “Dr. Kelsey said the number of combinations could be a hundred or more, representing a formidable challenge for a bureau that already was overburdened.”

Laziness won, and the FDA began looking for reasons to stop this. Eventually in late 1965, settling on preliminary data in dogs showing high doses of DMSO could change how the eyes focused (which was never reported in the trials being conducted on 37,000 people or subsequently in humans or monkeys) and a single death (that has never occurred since and was likely due to an allergy to another drug being taken concurrently), the FDA not only banned all DMSO testing in the United States, but sent out global telegrams to each embassy encouraging other nations to do the same. Following this, the FDA, eager to assert its newfound power, then began a relentless campaign to intimidate doctors and scientists into not conducting any further DMSO research (which, I believe is a large part of why researchers now are so reluctant to ever study “unorthodox” topics).
Note: the playbook the FDA used against DMSO was also used against many other remarkable (now largely forgotten) medical therapies.

Chris Beat Cancer: A C... Wark, Chris Check Amazon for Pricing. Fortunately, the scientific community had not yet lost their spine, and fought back, with Jacob organizing three American symposiums (one in 1966, along with one in 1974 and in 1982—along with a 1965 one in Germany and a 1966 one in Vienna). Sadly, despite the wide range of data presented, the FDA dug in, insisting there was “no evidence” DMSO worked for anything, and eventually, in 1980, a Congressional and Senate hearing were held on the FDA’s stonewalling, where the FDA repeated a variety of excuses and made a series of promises to stop stonewalling DMSO (which not surprisingly, were never followed).
Note: the first therapeutic FDA approval for DMSO (DMSO for interstitial cystitis) happened in 1978, and I suspect was motivated by the FDA wanting to create the impression they weren’t stonewalling DMSO drug application prior to those hearings (as no subsequent approvals ever happened despite many being sent in).

To support these 1980 hearings, Mike Wallace (of 60 Minutes) aired a program immediately before the first one, which introduced the public to DMSO, and created a new wave of widespread interest in DMSO (after the FDA successfully squashed the first one in the 1960s).

Following this, DMSO experienced another surge in popularity, but gradually was forgotten except by certain segments of the alternative health community and veterinarians (who widely use it in practice). Likewise, with American research, while there was initially a huge surge of it (particularly in the 1960s) it greatly declined, and by the 1990s, therapeutic studies of DMSO in humans or animals were rarely conducted. Instead, medical research in DMSO (besides its approved use for treating interstitial cystitis) largely shifted towards it:
• Being used as a cryopreservative
• Being used as an “inert” (harmless and non-beneficial) solvent to test a wide range of potentially therapeutic substances (predominantly in cell cultures).
• Making cancer cells revert to normal cells (which is often needed for research).
•Facilitating other therapies (e.g., there are now well over a dozen FDA approved drugs which contain DMSO as an “inert vehicle”).

Fortunately, in 1971, after extensive research the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Health approved it (as Dimexide/Dimexid/Димексид), and as a result, much of the forgotten data on DMSO’s medical uses comes from the Russian and Ukrainian literature, along with a smaller amount from Chinese, South American, and German researchers (most of which I have finally been able to compile).

Note: this history is covered in much more detail here.

Early Innovators

Propaganda essentially works because most humans want to follow the crowd, but simultaneously, there is always a small portion of the population which will trust their gut and have the courage to pursue things that aren’t yet “safe” to do because neither authorities or their peers are telling them to (e.g., despite the most aggressive propaganda campaign in history, immense peer pressure and increasingly strict vaccine mandates, roughly 25% of Americans did not get the COVID vaccine).

This blog in turn is catered to the self-directed “innovators” and “early adopters” as my goal as much as possible is to provide all the essential information one would need to understand a topic and then be able to figure out how to approach it, rather than giving you a set protocol for everyone to follow and “telling you what to do.” This I believe is essential, as virtually every therapy, despite having a standard dose, typically needs to be dosed differently for different people (and I believe many medical injuries with pharmaceuticals could be avoided if lower “non-standard” doses were used for more “sensitive patients”).

Beat Cancer Kitchen: D... Wark, Micah Check Amazon for Pricing. However, the education system trains everyone to repeat formulas and instructions rather than creatively thinking on their own, so the standardized model persists, and the harm the excessive doses create are simply viewed as a necessary cost of doing business. This is unfortunate as while (clean) DMSO has a fairly wide therapeutic window (so, unlike many far more toxic drugs, it is very difficult to take a DMSO dose which is high enough to be dangerous), the correct DMSO dose greatly varies from person to person. As such, many commentators (beginning with Jacob) have remarked that while it is incredibly easy to determine the correct dose for a unique patient you work with, DMSO lacking a “standardized dose” has been one of the most challenging aspects of widely deploying the drug.
Note: this is why I have to include about 8 pages of instructions on general DMSO use at the end of each DMSO article (e.g., I did so most recently here), along with a similar amount for specific conditions being discussed within a given article. This has worked for a lot of people (particularly early innovators), but simultaneously, many have not wanted to read through the instructions and instead simply wanted a simple universal protocol (which will inevitably not work for some of those who use it). This is quite challenging to navigate, and my approach has essentially been to hope that if I can provide enough clearly laid out information, the early innovators who see it can understand how to translate that to people they meet who just want a single protocol to follow.

The phrase “early innovators” in turn came to mind due to a noteworthy 1985 article which I read during the DMSO project (“DMSO, Hobby Shops and the FDA: The Diffusion of a Health Policy Dilemma”) which discussed DMSO and the diffusion of innovations (e.g., their adoption).
Note: the dilemma being referred to was that since DMSO was legal as an industrial solvent, the FDA could not ban it, and instead could only restrict people implying it had medical uses.

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