Dmso: Nature's Healer - Brossura

Acknowledgments

My appreciation is extended to the medical consultant for a first edition of this book. Ten years ago, William Campbell Douglass, M.D., then of Sarasota, Florida, put together a three-day medical conference comprised of experts on dimethyl sulfoxide. They came to Sarasota from around the United States and six foreign countries and brought specialty knowledge of DMSO with them. They shared this knowledge with each other, and I was the medical journalist who recorded their information, produced magazine and clinical journal articles, and eventually the first edition of this book. The present second edition is an update and then rewrite of that initial published effort.

Preface

The American Medical Association (AMA) held a leadership conference the weekend of February 14, 1981, and one of its speakers was Otis R. Bowen, M.D. Dr. Bowen is former governor of Indiana, a leader in medicine, management, and politics. In his presentation to the AMA, he shocked the assembly by admitting that he took the law into his own hands and used an illegal drug to ease his wife’s pain while she was dying. Beth Bowen died January 1, 1981, after months of agony from multiple myeloma, a type of bone cancer.

Dr. Bowen, who was preparing to step down from the governorship at the time, turned to dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, to ease his wife’s intense pain. He had obtained the liquid solvent from a veterinarian and found that it relieved his wife’s suffering “in minutes,” he said.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forbids the use of DMSO in humans except in treating a rare urinary bladder condition. Even in the face of the government ban, Dr. Bowen did what he knew was right for his wife by administering intravenous DMSO. “Why can’t dying persons, with severe pain, have easy prescription access to it?” he asked in his speech. “The only excuse I could find was that, after prolonged use and heavy dosage, it caused an occasional cataract in dogs only.”

Before you’ve read very far into this book, you’ll probably be asking questions similar to Dr. Bowen’s. It won’t be difficult to identify with the patients involved here, some of whom have been forced to take treatment into their own hands by turning to DMSO.

In fact, DMSO has not been found unsafe for humans. Any side effects are merely minor irritations. DMSO stops bacterial growth. It relieves pain. As a vasodilator, the drug enlarges small blood vessels, increasing the circulation to an area. It softens scar tissue and soothes burns. DMSO’s anti-inflammatory activity relieves the swelling and inflammation of arthritis, bursitis, tendinitis, and other musculoskeletal injuries. And it does many more good things of a therapeutic nature for anyone who is injured or ill.

I recommend that you use DMSO strictly under the supervision of a doctor who is skilled in its application. Only the pure pharmaceutical grade should be employed, not the crude industrial grade.

DMSO is both a drug and a good solvent. Industry values it for removing paints and varnishes, and dissolving certain plastics such as rayon, polyvinyl chloride, polyurethane, methacrylate, and acrylic. It doesn’t affect cotton, wool, nylon, leather, or polyesters.

More important, it benefits human body cells, tissues, and organs in unique ways. DMSO is the twenty-first century’s newest healing principle with a very wide range of usefulness. It represents an entirely different means of treating diseases—not as an ordinary drug that works for a given disease, but as a holistic ingredient that brings whole-body cellular function back to normal.

Dimethyl sulfoxide has had a battered thirty-year history. But because of the general public outcry about its ban, DMSO has become a household word and a medical-political cause célèbre. Those of us who have been using the drug for twenty-six to twenty-eight years never dreamed that it would become a focal point in the continuing battle between individual freedom and the power of government.

My colleagues and I have been criticized, ridiculed, and even persecuted in some medical circles for promoting and using DMSO. But I, and others like me, came to the conclusion, having observed establishment medical thinking for forty years, that the only way a truly revolutionary treatment principle can be brought to the patient is by appealing to the general population through the information media. That is the purpose of this book.

Much of my material will appear anecdotal to the scientist, but such language is what the public understands best. And sometimes a hundred patient stories, heard by a sensitive and intelligent physician, are as good as or better than a double-blind research project. Double-blind studies are often just that—everyone involved is blind and stays that way until, many years and thousands of patients later, it is discovered that the particular drug doesn’t work or is too toxic to warrant its use.

Good current examples of toxic drugs are the arthritis agents Motrin, Tolectin, Nalfon, and Naprosyn. They all underwent extensive double-blind testing. All are weak organic acids and prostaglandin inhibitors—like aspirin. About as effective as aspirin, these four drugs have two distinct differences: they are more toxic than aspirin and cost ten to thirty times more money. So much for double-blind studies.

Whether you agree or disagree with current claims, it’s likely you’ll affirm that if a drug has been proven safe, doctors should be free to use this agent when they believe it will help their patients. With all the extremely potent and dangerous drugs on the market, it is absurd to keep such an effective product as DMSO from pharmacy shelves.

Certainly not all of the claims for DMSO will prove to be valid, but in my opinion, many of them have already shown themselves to be true. And the most dramatic use of the medication is likely yet to be discovered.

Another purpose for my book is to point out the myriad applications of this unique substance. Once DMSO is legalized for use in all states and ethically produced for topical, parenteral, and oral administration, people won’t have to smuggle the feed-store grade and the crude industrial grade into their homes to paint on their arthritic joints.

DMSO will eventually find its place in the armamentarium of American medicine. We who believe in the substance want to see it happen sooner than later. The clinical evaluation of DMSO began in the United States in 1963 and now, in 1992, the FDA still has not approved the drug for more than one use. This situation gives rise to some underlying questions you may find running throughout this book. How do we get the FDA to see beyond its blind spot? How can we either bring DMSO to the people or declare the substance useless once and for all?

You will find lots of answers in these pages. DMSO needs even more public pressure than has been leveled at the regulatory process already. We want doctors to be able to prescribe DMSO without fear of censure from the medical world or the hospitals that employ them. If this doesn’t happen, it appears that little will be done to ensure that a pure, medical grade of DMSO will be made available for patients.

In writing this book, I have found a distinct reticence by doctors to have their names mentioned in connection with DMSO. Often they provided me with glowing case reports of successes with the drug treatment, but their fear of colleague criticism prevented my revealing their identities. I had to discard such reports, and there were hundreds of them.

DMSO has the largest potential number of uses ever documented for a single chemical. My wish is that this book will bring more of them into the public domain than has been allowed to this point. It should be well understood by everyone at the outset that I don’t say the substance is some kind of miracle cure. More properly, DMSO is a very effective and versatile compound that has been successfully adapted for a number of health problems. I want to get it into the hands of more people so that they may be relieved of discomforts and diseases for which DMSO is appropriate. I hope you will agree that mine is a worthy goal.

Morton Walker, D.P.M.

Stamford, Connecticut

CHAPTER 1

The Painkiller With a Problem

In the late spring of 1980, Eva Lee Snead, M.D., then a family practice specialist in San Antonio, Texas, learned that her friend, thirty-two-year-old psychologist Marjorie Saloman, was supposed to undergo a hysterectomy, the removal of her uterus. Mrs. Saloman’s genital system problem arose from a stenosis of the cervical os. This condition is a narrowing or stricture at the mouth of the neck-like opening to the uterus where it extends into the vagina.

The psychologist described to Dr. Snead how several unsuccessful attempts at cervical dilatation had been attempted by her gynecologist. He tried to relax the cervix by injecting local anesthesia at its lower quadrant. Such an anesthetic technique usually is simple and effective, but this particular block had been no help to the woman even after many tries. Mrs. Saloman’s gynecologist admitted that for her the attempted cervical dilatation was a complete failure.

The pain had been so great for this patient that when the dilatation instrument was inserted she had fainted. Her gynecologist quickly removed the instrument because the anesthetic was not allaying the pain. None of his attempts to relieve the problem worked; surgical removal of the uterus was the next procedure of choice.

Dr. Snead asked her friend to wait a week before having the hysterectomy, if delay was agreeable to the gynecologist. Complying with this request, Marjorie Saloman had her physician telephone Dr. Snead to learn the medical reasoning behind it.

Having some prior experiences with DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide) treatment, Dr. Snead persuaded him to combine the substance with vitamin E and apply it topically to the patient’s cervical area. Dr. Snead wanted to try to reduce the woman’s scar tissue and adhesions, which DMSO is able to do.

“I was lucky enough to run into the gynecologist on the day that we were going to apply the DMSO,” Dr. Snead wrote me, “and he inserted the substance himself with the vitamin E. Before five minutes were over, his instrument slipped into the cervix without any sensation felt by the patient.”

A month later, the gynecologist rechecked the woman’s constricted cervix and found it was still overly narrow. He repeated the application of DMSO and vitamin E, and after a few minutes was able to insert the instrument to stretch the opening without any problem. This time it was a highly successful procedure, and the hospital appointment for surgery was cancelled.

The patient wore a device that was inserted to keep the cervical canal’s wall stretched. In the meantime, Dr. Snead placed her friend on megavitamin therapy using high doses of nutrient substances to restore health to surrounding tissues.

One month after the device had been inserted, the woman was again checked by her gynecologist who found the cervical os perfectly expanded. He was able to insert probes without first applying DMSO or anesthesia and without the patient feeling any discomfort. Marjorie Saloman had definitely been saved from having a hysterectomy.

Yet Dr. Eva Lee Snead had her medical license revoked for repeatedly employing DMSO and other forms of complementary medicine—what some have labelled “quackery” but that rightly may be considered alternative methods of healing. The state of Texas is not predisposed to allowing deviations from the medical mainstream. And, as you will see, use of dimethyl sulfoxide by forward-looking physicians is out of the medical mainstream.

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Lorae Avery, Ph.D., director of The Health Center, Inc., an acupuncture and nutrition clinic in Auburndale, Florida, expressed her amazement to me at the effectiveness of DMSO in eliminating pain. She saw excellent results when physicians working for The Health Center applied the substance externally to patients. One of them was sixty-five-year-old Anna Goldeman, who had been suffering for years with bursitis of the right shoulder. She went to The Health Center for relief of the bursitis in November, 1980, and was gratified by the results of DMSO treatment.

More dramatic than the patient’s alleviation of her shoulder pain was the easing of a discomfort that had begun four years previously. Mrs. Goldeman had undergone amputation of the left hip high in the groin, which resulted in “phantom limb pain.” After amputation of a limb, or a portion of it, the amputee may experience strange sensations as though the part were still there. This feeling of phantom pain is generally considered to be a stump hallucination. It arises from various types of nerve stimuli, resulting in burning, tingling, pricking, tickling, or really severe pain. Such sensations are not uncommon for an amputee and are not readily treatable.

With application of DMSO to her right shoulder, phantom limb pain with its constant twitching went out of Mrs. Goldeman’s left groin. She no longer sensed that she still had an extremity. Now she could feel more at peace with her situation.

Dr. Avery said, “We did not attempt to treat the phantom limb pain; our physicians were concerned with the bursitis. Yet, the phantom pain disappeared coincidentally from application of DMSO to the woman’s shoulder. Thus, what happened is, DMSO applied to one part of the body caused phantom pain to go away in another part of the body. And it’s permanently stayed away.”

Checking back with Dr. Avery over ten years later, I learned that Mrs. Goldeman continues in comfort knowing that DMSO is available to cease her pain whenever needed.

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Murray Franklin, M.D., of Chicago, is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, as well as the medical director of the Union Health Service, the largest prepaid medical plan in the state of Illinois. He received a supply of DMSO in the fall of 1980 and decided to try it for the benefit of some patients for whom nothing else had worked. One of the people receiving topical therapeutic applications was Lucas Sheinholtz, fifty-two, who had been troubled with rheumatoid-osteoarthritis of both knees for more than a decade. Mr. Sheinholtz, hobbling with the assistance of two canes, arrived at Dr. Franklin’s office complex to visit another physician. The patient had previously received many injections of cortisone, which his regular physician administered routinely. But no appreciable improvement in his arthritis had been observed by either the patient or his doctor.

“I suggested to the man’s physician that we might paint some DMSO on both of his painful knees,” Dr. Franklin said. “His right knee was swollen; the left knee was not. The right knee was warm to the touch. The patient’s doctor agreed to a therapeutic trial, and I applied DMSO in three applications. Since I was not fully acquainted with how to use the solution, I allowed an application to dry and then put it on again and again. Within fifteen to twenty minutes the patient said he felt no pain and was able to walk...