The DMSO Moment: How an Old Medicine Finds New Life

Key doctors share their protocols and the possibilities for long-forgotten DMSO for everything from cold sores to lung disease.

Erica Eyres (left) is tethered in August 2023 to an oxygen pack held by her husband, Bill, due to her failing lungs. On another cruise in January, she is free of oxygen. Her interstitial lung disease diagnosis was reversed after five months on DMSO, as a topical gel and then orally. “All I can say is where did the ground glass go?” she said. “It was there and now it’s not. DMSO.”

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Erica Eyres, a vigorous fifty-six-year-old aerobics instructor who had struggled to breathe, was given “absolutely devastating” news in 2022: She might need a lung transplant. She had never smoked, ran cross-country track in high school, and was a personal trainer for years, but, by 2024, a transplant assessment was arranged.

“I decided that I will make that decision,” she said, “only if it’s the last resort, and I’m on my deathbed.”

A few months before her consultation, however, Eyres, then fifty-eight, made an appointment with a new primary care doctor for routine prescription refills. She was about to be introduced, literally and figuratively, to a new kind of medicine. It would change everything.

Dr. James Miller, a former surgeon, liked to get to know his patients, so he asked Eyres for her history. She told him of her diagnosis, thirty years prior, with a serious but manageable case of scleroderma. After two covid vaccinations in 2020, however, this auto-immune disorder, which can affect skin and organs, showed exactly what it could do.

Exhausted and tethered to an oxygen tank, Eyres spent months on her couch. She took medications that had awful side effects. Her lungs were “loaded with ground glass opacities in the lower lobes,” she said, which CT scans confirm. Eyres was diagnosed in 2021 with interstitial lung disease and pulmonary arterial hypertension. Her work in physical fitness was over.

When Eyres finished her history, she got two surprises. Miller agreed it was likely that the covid shots had made her condition, he later told me, “massively worse.” He then listened to her lungs to see how bad they sounded. “Don’t rush that,” he said of the transplant, a sure sign of a doctor who believed in other options.

Eyres was ecstatic. Miller, she said, was the “first doctor that actually hears me.” Two others had dismissed her contention, even as studies documented vaccine harm; Yale University recently reported that patients with “post-vaccination syndrome” had impaired immune systems and prolonged spike protein production “compared to healthy controls.”

Miller then offered Eyres help in the form of three easy-to-find supplements for her vaccine injury: nattokinase, bromelain, and turmeric. She soon felt better.

It was on her second visit, a month later, that Miller suggested Eyres smear a gel supplement over her chest and lung area called DMSO to help her condition. This time, Eyres “kinda gave the eye roll,” she told me.

She was in for the biggest surprise yet.

DMSO: ‘Transformative’

During the pandemic, a relative few doctors dared to treat Covid-19 with off-label medications like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, at the risk of their reputations and licenses. Both drugs were safe and FDA-approved and had saved millions from river blindness and malaria; ivermectin had won its researchers the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. The drugs also worked against Covid-19.

Now, in the pandemic aftermath, some of these doctors are again veering outside the entrenched pharmaceutical model with dimethyl sulfoxide.

An over-the-counter supplement and drug, DMSO has been known since the 1960s to allay many maladies—promoting circulation; reducing catastrophic swelling; resolving blood clots; healing burns, wounds, and skin disorders; curbing chronic pain; and—among its greatest powers—stopping strokes and healing their aftermath.

But DMSO was inexpensive, safe, and natural, meaning this substance from wood-pulp processing could not be patented. And so it was largely forgotten by medicine.

Until now.

“Last week I cut my finger while making dinner. I had that feeling I was going to need stiches as it was deep and gushing. I had some DMSO in my kitchen somewhere in the 10-20 percent range. I poured it on my finger and within 10 seconds it stopped bleeding, no pain or swelling and the edges came together. I’ve never seen anything like that before!!! Wild.”

That testimonial was sent by a patient to Dr. Pierre Kory, a pulmonologist and former intensive care chief at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose hospital career ended when he opposed top-down Covid-19 protocols. Dr. Miller, too, left his job as a respected surgeon, having rejected the standard covid menu of patented drugs and what he saw as risky vaccines.

Both are using DMSO today. Miller treats a gamut of everyday complaints, in one case resolving a patient’s kidney stone after topical application, as I reported in my first DMSO article.

Kory’s specialized practice focuses largely on vaccine injury, with impairments that may be difficult to measure or put a name to. He sees more subtle, but, he believes, meaningful changes with DMSO.

“In my direct experience, I find it transformative in terms of the number of conditions that it can help against,” said Dr. Kory (with whom, full disclosure, I sometimes write op-ed articles). “The responses and testimonials are just beginning to roll in and are amazing to receive.”

Inspired by an anonymous physician and Substack writer called A Midwestern Doctor, whose articles have resurrected DMSO, Kory starts his DMSO treatments topically and quickly moves to oral administration, usually one-and-a-half teaspoons twice a day, he said.

Among his results: A patient whose painful prostate condition, called chronic prostatitis, resolved with topical use. Another whose all-over body pain was reduced by 90 percent. Yet another’s pain was relieved after his chest was opened to remove a large cancerous tumor. Consider that alternative treatments for pain often involve addictive drugs.

In another case, a patient’s brain fog eased and memory improved. In other cases, a disfiguring “keloid” scar, a granuloma annulare skin condition, a cold sore, and a stye all responded to DMSO. Kory’s partner, Lisa, banged her foot “hard” on furniture recently, he said. Twenty minutes after applying DMSO, “The bruising and swelling disappeared.”

“We have had many patients,” he said, “report relief of chronic joint, bone, and extremity pains.”

“In reviewing the research,” he further told me, “I think it would be a game changer in terms of the treatment of strokes and brain bleeds, two of the most devastating medical events that can happen to anyone, and which cause an immense economic toll in this country.”

Erica’s Monthly Meds: $15,000 versus $80

When Erica Eyres went to Dr. Miller, she was on two drugs for her lung diagnosis: CellCept, which she had been taking for two years, and Ofev, which she had been taking for four months. They were “awful drugs,” she said, that caused headaches and gastrointestinal problems.

CellCept, a drug intended to prevent organ rejection but used off-label for her lung disease, costs about $2,300 a month at Eyres’ dosage, though it is available as an affordable generic drug.

Ofev, a lung disease drug, is not. It is priced at “around $14,120” a month, according to Drugs.com.

Without the insurance and co-pay assistance Eyres received, patients potentially pay more than $15,000 a month for those two drugs.

By contrast, the treatments Dr. Miller suggested came to about $80 a month, including $50 for nattokinase, bromelain, and curcumin, and another $30, combined, for DMSO mixed with aloe vera and, later, the oral version. All were purchased online.

Erica’s Turning Point

In December 2023, seven months before she saw Dr. Miller, Eyres’ second CT scan results were again ominous. They read in part, “Re-demonstrated diffuse centrilobular ground glass nodularity in the lungs, slightly more pronounced in the lower lobes … Expiratory images demonstrate air trapping throughout both lungs.” (Ground glass nodules, common in late-stage covid, are abnormal spots on the lungs. Air trapping is the inability to fully exhale, leading to shortness of breath.)

The diagnosis was given as interstitial lung disease or ILD.

In November 2024, Eyres went for another CT scan in preparation for a lung transplant consultation. She had been using DMSO for five months at that point, mostly topically and in the previous month, orally. The scan found, “No evidence of interstitial lung disease. No air-trapping.”

The subsequent transplant consultation was swift: The pulmonologist looked at her CT results and told her she was stable, she said. “Nothing more we need to do,” he said.

“We head over to the transplant center and the doctor comes in and sits down and tells me, ‘You do not have ILD, your lungs on CT scan are clear!!!!’” Eyres wrote in an email to me.

“Nobody can understand or explain this,” she wrote. “All I can say is, where did the ground glass go? It was there and now it’s not. DMSO.”

She had made her appointment with Miller only because her standing primary care doctor was not available. “BEST thing I ever did!!!!” she wrote.

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Robert Herschler (left) lead chemist at Crown Zellerbach, a paper mill in Camas, Washington, is shown with Dr. Stanley Jacob, who pioneered the medical use of DMSO. Herschler provided DMSO, a pulp processing byproduct, for Jacob’s research. In 1964, they published a science journal article. entitled, “Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO): A new concept in pharmacotherapy.” Stanley Jacob died in 2015.

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Dr. Jacob’s Long Shadow

In an oral history recorded in 1998 at Oregon Health & Science University, DMSO pioneer Dr. Stanley Jacob described his remarkable discovery prompted, in the often arcane way of science, by a 1959 Lancet article on selected substances, dimethyl sulfoxide among them, that lessened the damage to cells from freezing. At the time, he was looking for ways to preserve transplant organs (for which DMSO is still used). His ground-breaking work—and his observation that it could penetrate the skin without damaging it and disseminate throughout the body in seconds—brought DMSO into research laboratories and clinics nationwide.

“Intrigued by this suspected cause-and-effect reaction, Jacob and his colleagues began a research journey to find out what else this simple molecule could do and, in so doing, set off an explosion of publications worldwide,” Jacob and his co-author, Dr. Jack de la Torre, wrote in the 2015 book, Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO) in Trauma and Disease.

In it, they describe DMSO as “a free radical scavenger; an anti-inflammatory, antipain, anticancer, cell membrane stabilizer; and a neuroprotective agent in preventing and treating trauma and disease.” It is also “a chemical chaperone” that enhances the penetration and delivery of other drugs, one of its few accepted uses.

In 1978, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved DMSO for a single diagnosis—interstitial cystitis—and has not added another since. In the oral history, Dr. Jacob said DMSO won him a prestigious German award and might have won the Nobel Prize. “It didn’t because the FDA halted studies,” he said. A highly favorable 60 Minutes segment in 1980 did not change that.

“Now, you hear a lot of controversy about DMSO, but it’s only truly controversial from an economic and a bureaucratic standpoint,” he continued. “There’s no scientific controversy. Since our first paper there have been 55,000 papers in the world of scientific literature on DMSO, and they come from 125 countries, and each one of them has three or four authors and probably took six or eight months to complete.

“Now, if we had nothing but a liniment that goes on the skin, you wouldn’t see 55,000 articles, mostly peer review journals. We just wouldn’t have it.”

Those studies also attest to DMSO’s stellar safety record; a review of 109 studies described “a variety of adverse reactions that are mostly transient and mild.” Even an FDA official interviewed for 60 Minutes said, “Nobody’s died from using DMSO. It’s a relatively safe drug as [far as] drugs go.”

Unfortunately, twenty-first century standards demand costly randomized controlled trials to approve new drugs, which will continue to impede DMSO’s widespread medical use.

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Dr. Stanley Jacob and Dr. Jack de la Torre documented DMSO’s biological actions against cardiac and nervous system damage and wrote Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO) in Trauma and Disease, published in 2015.

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Postscript and Commentary

Erica Eyres is off the two lung drugs. She exercises with weights and walks every day, although too much exertion causes her to need oxygen. Beyond that, she describes herself as “totally normal.”

She is still being treated for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a rare and serious type of high blood pressure that strains the heart and leads to shortness of breath.

For that diagnosis, Eyres has so far received ten injections of Winrevair, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last April for PAH. According to Forbes.com, “The drug’s sponsor, Merck, will sell Winrevair for a list price of approximately $14,000 per vial or roughly $240,000 a year, depending on a person’s weight.” Once again, Eyres was fortunate to have insurance and co-pay assistance.

Everyone is not so fortunate. And it remains an open question why pharmaceutical giants—whose prices are controlled by regulation in Europe and elsewhere—are allowed to charge so much in the United States.

Topical First

DMSO is widely available online, and some naturopathic doctors and nontraditional practitioners use it, as does a veterinarian I spoke with. But most people, and most doctors (including my own), know little about its potential to heal and its documented safety.

Dr. Miller, who treated Erica Eyres, has what he calls a relatively simple set of protocols for DMSO. He emailed me his approach:

“What I’ve been doing is based on the rapid systemic absorption of DMSO through the body. For example, if you put a large amount on your knee, you will taste it within a minute—showing that it is probably not necessary to start an IV to get systemic uptake. Therefore, I emphasize a topical approach first.

“Part of this is based on simplicity and palatability, another part is based on when I read the protocols about IV preparation, and mixing it—the application seems very cumbersome. And I say that from the context of someone with a degree in chemistry, and a recently retired trauma surgeon that would be somewhat intimidated to initiate these protocols on myself.

“So here’s what I do:

“For most everyone I start with 70 percent aloe-based gel and have them apply topically. For people with gall stones or kidney stones I have them apply it over the area in question. For people who are recovering from a stroke I have them rub it on the temporal arteries, the center of the forehead, and carotid arteries. For people with neuropathy, on the area in question/that hurts or is weak.

“For people with systemic diseases, like lupus, after they’ve had approximately 1 month of experience with topical application, I have them test with oral administration of ½ teaspoon a day mixed in something like orange juice or tonic water, and then have them advance up to a tablespoon a day titrating based on the smell.”

I asked Dr. Miller if, when he suggested that Eyres try DMSO, he was hoping to improve her lung function and perhaps even curb her interstitial lung disease.

“It was not with the intent to treat the ILD,” he told me. “I was treating her scleroderma. The effect on her ILD was a happy side effect.”