When I promised a reader that DMSO was going to be my first major research project for 2026, I knew I was in for a challenge. Attitudes to this widely-used solvent run the gamut, from it’s a miraculous cure for pain, autoimmune disease, gut conditions, eye disorders and just about everything else under the sun, to it’s a toxic waste product that causes neurological damage and birth defects.

Anyone who attempts to conduct a nuanced discussion about the risks and benefits of DMSO is immediately set upon by hordes of commenters testifying that DMSO cured their acne/joint pain/cancer/cataracts/multiple sclerosis/Ebola/whatever. If internet comments were the sole criterion for assessing the efficacy of a treatment, it would be a slam dunk: DMSO is a miracle cure that allows the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, and the blind to see. With the coming of DMSO, Jesus might as well hang up his sandals. Brian, on the other hand…

But, as my loyal readers know, my criteria for assessing the risks and benefits of a treatment do not include ‘What do people say about it on the Internet?’ It’s not that I’m dismissive of self-reports. It’s just that I’ve been in clinical practice long enough (over 30 years, in fact!) to a) have seen a ludicrous number of ‘miracle cures’ come and go – remember aloe vera, noni juice, wheatgrass, spirulina, royal jelly, SAMe, zeolite, Herbalife, the candida diet, the blood type diet, the Zone diet and coffee enemas? – and b) to know that many people believe that some particular agent either caused their ailment or cured it, but upon proper testing these beliefs frequently turn out to be dead wrong.

I cannot tell you how many clients I’ve seen who fervently believed that some food or other caused their arthritic pain, or insomnia, or skin rash, but when they did a properly-conducted rechallenge with that food, it did not provoke any symptoms. And likewise, I’ve witnessed many instances when a supplement was credited with making a symptom disappear… but then the symptom came back again while the client was still taking the supplement they believed had cured them. Ditto for fad diets. We humans are strange and fascinating creatures. We can make ourselves believe all manner of absurd things, and many of us will continue to cling to our beliefs even when cold, hard reality is smacking us in the face with irrefutable evidence of their falsity.

If we weren’t such irrational beings, the plural of anecdote might well be data. But we are, so it’s not.

To be fair, if many anecdotes point in the same direction, it’s certainly warranted to devise a properly controlled test of the hypothesis generated by all those anecdotes. And that’s the problem with DMSO: very few of the claims made for its miraculous healing powers have ever been subjected to rigorous testing, and in the rare cases where such testing has been conducted, the results are frequently indeterminate or contradictory.

In the next few posts, I’m going to be working my way through the DMSO literature as systematically as I can, weighing the claims made for the ‘miracle solvent’ against the evidence. If you have papers you want me to review, please send me a link.

I welcome your comments, but please understand that if you share a DMSO success story, I’m going to be grilling you about every detail of the case, including the duration of symptoms, how your diagnosis was made, how your cure was confirmed, and any other treatments you used or changes you made which may account for the results you attribute to DMSO. I will be doing this not to attack you or imply that you’re lying, but to both obtain better data for myself and all my readers, and to encourage you to think more analytically and critically about your own experience.

Finally – and I’ll no doubt be returning to this point, but I might as well get it on the table now – there is a world of difference between ‘symptom relief’ and ‘healing’. As I’ve stated repeatedly on this blog, health comes from healthful living. There will always be a need for effective treatments for acute conditions that overwhelm the body’s capacity for self-healing (such as strokes and heart attacks), and it may well be that DMSO fits neatly into that niche. However, the overwhelming majority of conditions that plague people living in wealthy, industrialised societies are the direct result of habits, practices and environmental factors that either introduce causes of disease, sap self-healing capacity, or both. Anything that promises to cure diet and lifestyle-induced diseases without changing the diet and lifestyle factors that caused said diseases, is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

It disturbs me to no end that most practitioners engaged in so-called ‘alternative healing’ embrace the exact same ‘remedy mentality’ that they vehemently criticise in conventional allopathic doctors. As a wise man is reputed to have said, over 2000 years ago,

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