It might not be something your doctor wants to talk about, but it certainly is something we should all know more about. The video from an old 60 Minutes episode is a must see.
Dimethyl Sulfoxide (DMSO)
Exactly six months ago, I used this newsletter to bring the public’s attention to DMSO, a simple naturally occurring compound that has a number of immense therapeutic benefits and virtually no toxicity (detailed here). In turn, when it was discovered in the 1960s, it quickly became America’s most desired drug (as it cured many incurable ailments). A lot of the scientific community promptly got behind it and before long, thousands of papers had been published on every conceivable medical application for it. Consider for example this 1980 program 60 Minutes aired on DMSO:
As such, throughout this series, I’ve presented the wealth of evidence that DMSO effectively treats:
Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.
A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).
Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.
A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).
A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).
A wide range of internal organ diseases such as pancreatitis, infertility, liver cirrhosis, and endometriosis (discussed here).
A wide range of skin conditions such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).
Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).
In turn, when I published this series (because of both how effective and easily accessible DMSO is) it caught on like wildfire, this publication went from being the ninth to top ranked newsletter in the genre, there was a nationwide DMSO shortage, and I’ve received almost two thousand testimonials from people who benefitted from DMSO (and often had remarkable results—particularly for chronic pain).
That response was quite surprising and in my eyes, a testament not only to how well DMSO works, but more importantly, how effectively DMSO’s story was erased from history (e.g., many long-time enthusiasts of natural health shared that they were blown away they’d never heard of it). This sadly illustrates how effectively the medical industry can bury anything threatening its bottom line (e.g., the FDA—for rather petty reasons—used everything at their disposal to make sure DMSO was forgotten).
In turn, within the DMSO story, I believe one of the least appreciated (or even known) facets of it are the remarkable contributions DMSO makes to the treatment of cancer—which is even more remarkable given that far more research has been done with DMSO and cancer than all the other topics I just listed. Consequently, for months I’ve wanted to publish an article on this (particularly since one incredible natural cancer therapy utilizes DMSO), but simultaneously, it just wasn’t feasible to as there was so much literature to go through.
That’s been weighing on me considerably (e.g. many readers have asked me to prioritize this article over everything else), so over the last three months (and particularly the last three weeks), I shifted my responsibilities to focus on the topic thoroughly. While it took a bit of a toll on me, the article is now done. As such, I greatly hope some of what’s in here can benefit you and I likewise thank each of you who has supported this newsletter and made it possible for me to spend so much time delving into these critical forgotten sides of medicine.
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Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) effectively treats a broad spectrum of conditions, including strokes, pain, tissue injuries, autoimmune inflammation, and cancer.
DMSO inhibits cancer growth and consistently reverts cancer cells to their normal state.
DMSO enhances cancer visibility to immune cells, enabling the body to eliminate tumors previously undetected by the immune system.
DMSO effectively mitigates major challenges in conventional cancer care, such as radiation damage, chemotherapy toxicity, and pain from “incurable” metastatic cancer.
DMSO markedly boosts the efficacy of many chemotherapy drugs, allowing safer, lower doses to achieve the same results.
When paired with certain natural therapies, DMSO often produces highly effective cancer treatments, revolutionizing cancer care.
Cancer is one of the most challenging conditions to deal with in medicine, as two seemingly identical cancers can have very different causes. As a result, any standardized (holistic or conventional) protocol will inevitably fail some of the patients it is meant to treat.
Furthermore, since there is so much fear surrounding cancer (e.g., from what the primal fear brings up inside you, from how your social circle reacts to it and from how the medical system uses all of that to push cancer therapies) it is often very difficult to have a clear head about the ordeal or find the right source of advice.
Likewise, since so much money is involved (e.g. 65% of oncologist’s revenues comes from chemotherapy drugs and cancer drugs are by far the most profitable drug market), there is significant pushback (e.g. from medical boards or unhappy relatives) against anyone who attempts alternative cancer therapies making it very difficult to practice unconventional cancer care—particularly since no alternative treatment works all the time. Note: in a recent article, I highlighted how urologists initially would not touch Lupron (which is now also used as a the puberty blocker) because of how unsafe and ineffective it was, but once they started being paid a lot of money to prescribe it for prostate cancer, it rapidly became their number one drug.
In contrast, while the conventional cancer therapies often have serious issues that make them far worse than any benefit they offer, some conventional cancer therapies are frequently the only available option which can save someone’s life (which has led to me at different times having fights with close friends or relatives either not to do chemotherapy or to get them to start it in cases where I felt it was absolutely necessary).
Given all of this, I presently believe that no “ideal” cancer treatment exists, but if it can be done (e.g., it’s effective for the cancer and feasible to implement), the most ideal to least ideal treatments are as follows:
•Identifying the root cause of a cancer, removing it, and having it quickly and permanently go away on its own (which is sometimes possible).
•Have enough time to rebalance the body so that its terrain no longer supports the cancer and the cancer can fade away on its own (which is often doable but a fairly involved process many have difficulty carrying out).
•Significantly enhance the function of the immune system so that it will eliminate the cancer.
•Find a treatment that is toxic to the cancer but relatively benign to the rest of the body.
•Find a treatment with an acceptable toxicity level and find ways to mitigate its effects.
•Accept a moderately toxic treatment with significant side effects.
•Focus on living with the cancer rather than curing it and then finding ways to mitigate the symptoms you experience both from it and any existing treatment protocols.
•Use a costly conventional therapy that is unlikely to work and live with all the side effects until your life ends (which in more extreme treatment regimens can be quite severe).
If we take a step back, what’s truly remarkable about DMSO, depending on how it is used, is that it can effectively provide most of the benefits listed above with the least amount of collateral damage (e.g., side-effects, toxicity, etc.).
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The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.
“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”
But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.
The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.
Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.
Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.
FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.
The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.
Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.
“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.
Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.
Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.
The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.
Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.
Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.
Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.
The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.
David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shotswith Pfizer and Moderna.
Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.
That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.
HHS is also working to “reverse the Biden administration’s attempt” to classify gender dysphoria as a type of disability.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services unveiled a multi-pronged regulatory effort Thursday to curtail gender-affirming care for minors, including gender transition procedures at hospitals.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has drafted a rule that would prohibit pharmaceutical or surgical gender reassignment procedures from receiving federal Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program funding. It’s also proposing a rule that would allow it to withdraw Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospitals that perform such surgeries on minors. HHS is also working to “reverse the Biden administration’s attempt” to classify gender dysphoria as a type of disability. If gender dysphoria were to be defined as a disability, then health care providers who don’t want to perform what the department has dubbed “sex-rejecting” procedures could be in danger of violating anti-discrimination laws.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., described gender affirming procedures as “unsafe” and “irreversible,” and framed the administration’s actions as “[protecting] America’s most vulnerable.”
“Our children deserve better – and we are delivering on that promise,” Kennedy told reporters Thursday.
The department is acting on directives from an executive order from President Donald Trump’s first few weeks in office. The Jan. 28 order called on government agencies to “[defund] chemical and surgical mutilation” of children, seemingly in the manner that HHS has proposed, as well as “rescind or amend all policies” relying on guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
The Food and Drug Administration is also taking regulatory action against some organizations that market breast binders to minors.
“Illegal marketing of these products for children is alarming, and the FDA will take further enforcement action such as import alerts, seizures, and injunctions if it continues,” said Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary.
Kennedy signed a declaration Thursday that gender affirming procedures for minors “do not meet professionally recognized standards of health care” and the Assistant Secretary for Health and Head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, Admiral Brian Christine, signed a public health message stating the same.
“Evidence shows sex-rejecting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are dangerous. Providers have an obligation to offer care grounded in evidence and to avoid interventions that expose young people to a lifetime of harm,” Christine said.
The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would criminalize the act of providing gender affirming care to minors.
