The Medical Advisor

The FDA long ago buried dimethyl sulfoxide, but a crusading physician and the medical freedom movement may resurrect it for stroke, paralysis, chronic pain, and more. Mary Beth Pfeiffer |  Feb 14, 2025 Rosa Azucena Aguirre received intravenous DMSO after she severed her spinal column in a fall. (From left) Pre- and post-surgery X-rays, and recently taking physical therapy. “What Rosita has achieved now is fantastic because she is independent,” said her husband, Juan Ayala. In 2017, Rosa Azucena Aguirre, fifty-one years old, fell through a skylight and landed one floor below and face up on concrete. Her X-rays show a horrifically mangled lower spine that took some eight hours of surgery to align. Mrs. Aguirre, who lives in Quito, Ecuador, was left paralyzed from the waist down. While most traumatic spine breaks are treated with high-dose steroids, Mrs. Aguirre was given a safe, natural substance virtually unused in the United States: dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO. “I was told aft...

A woman facing a lung transplant reversed her condition with a $30 over-the-counter treatment. Doctors told her she had no options. A new doctor suggested DMSO. Months later? Her lungs were CLEAR.  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. Buy on Amazon “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 ...

Mike Ridgway of Tennessee treated his early lymphoma with two shoeboxes of medications from India. Within eleven months, his three PET scans went from ominous to better to normal. A retired software programmer, Ridgway took long-established, off-patent drugs that are surely not on a typical oncologist’s radar: ivermectin, fenbendazole (a veterinary drug), and colchicine. They cost $400 for six months of treatment. Standard pharmaceuticals for early lymphoma, by contrast,  cost  an average $12,396 a year in the United States. Cancer medications, no surprise, are Pharma’s  biggest  money-maker, with $160 billion in sales annually, or 20 percent of world drug revenues. Ridgway, who is sixty-five years old, represents a small share of cancer patients who choose alternative care in part because they mistrust profit-driven oncology and dislike the chemo drawbacks. The drugs they take—under the supervision of a physician and sometimes with traditional therapies—are support...