EXCLUSIVE: Your Biggest DMSO Questions Finally Answered
A Midwestern Doctor brings expert clarity to what people are getting wrong about DMSO — and what the real science shows it can actually do.
Dear readers, I have something special for you today, an exclusive interview with the author behind The Forgotten Side of Medicine, A Midwestern Doctor.
I know many of you have questions about DMSO — and I actually do, too. That’s why I asked
to have a back-and-forth conversation to get your most common questions about DMSO answered.In case you’re not familiar, The Forgotten Side of Medicine has quickly become a powerhouse medical newsletter on Substack, reaching #1 in the Health Politics category — a remarkable achievement.
A Midwestern Doctor’s work is so detailed and prolific that it’s almost hard to believe a single person can consistently publish 10,000-word reports with such ease.
But
delivers every time, providing all the medical receipts so you can make truly informed decisions about your health.Without further ado, onto the interview.
NOTE: In the conversation below, I will appear as “VF,” and A Midwestern Doctor will appear as “AMD.”
VF:
, I know you are very busy, so I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I am going to try to focus on asking a few of the questions I’ve received from a lot of people. First, the growth of your Substack in the last year has been incredible, and it’s now one of the world’s top health newsletters. What are your current goals with the newsletter?AMD: I have four interrelated things I’ve been aiming to accomplish:
•Expose the most harmful pharmaceutical products out there in an understandable and data driven manner so their excessive and inappropriate use decreases. I deeply believe that if this is done correctly, the truth will win, particularly since a market now exists for this type of information and uncensored platforms exist to distribute it (e.g., you have 2 million followers and posts you’ve made with content I gave you to reformat routinely get millions of views, eclipsing much of the entire mainstream media).
•Bring awareness to forgotten medical therapies that were pushed out by the medical monopoly, and make the best case possible for them, both so that they have a real chance of being used again, and so that people see there are real alternatives to the dismal medical therapies they’ve been forced to settle for. I’ve focused on DMSO because it’s been one of the highest yield areas to focus on (as it’s very accessible, safely treats a wide range of “incurable” conditions, has a very high treatment success rate and has tens of thousands of studies validating its use), but I also have a few other therapies I feel need to be covered, particularly ultraviolet blood irradiation and ozone (along with others like chlorine dioxide and hydrogen peroxide).
•A lot of the initial support that made this newsletter possible came from the vaccine safety movement, so I want to do what I can to support them at the most important times (e.g., Senator Ron Johnson is arguably the strongest Congressional advocate for vaccine safety in American history, which is why I’ve prioritized promoting his work and partnered with you to do the same).
•Finally, I feel the MAHA moment is a once in a lifetime chance to improve a lot of longstanding problems we have, so at the most important times, I’ve tried to support what RFK Jr’s team is doing, and in most cases it dovetails with the previous three (e.g., RFK shares my goal of exposing the dangers of SSRIs).
VF: It’s been incredible to see what you’ve been able to do on the antidepressant issue by focusing on the strong evidence linking them to mass shootings and then using that as a bridge to expose the far more common dangers of antidepressants. Given how taboo the subject is, I was nearly in disbelief when RFK Jr. shared the post I made about your SSRI article during 2024 campaign, and even more so that the Secretary of Health and Human Services would ever do this:
That brings me to what you’ve been working on now. What has your focus been on recently?
AMD: I really want to finish the DMSO series so I can move on to my next focus, but I also feel it needs to be done properly without corners being cut to make the impact it can make in the moment we are at. The two main areas I have not yet done deep dives on are how DMSO transforms dentistry (as that is a very large subject) and how DMSO greatly helps urinary and sexual health (I have minimal experience with male sexual health as I rarely discuss the subject with friends or patients—so I’ve needed a lot more time to discuss the subject with colleagues prior to publishing the article).
Because of all of that, after I finished the eye article (and before the sexual health article) I decided I needed to start a project I’d been putting off for months—going through the entire body of DMSO literature.
Initially, I thought this was impossible to do as DMSO, dimethyl sulfoxide and dimethylsulfoxide collectively get over 6 million results on Google Scholar (along with all the other foreign spellings and brand name formulations I’ve identified thus far). However, I eventually realized that there were a lot of ways to filter this down without eliminating the meaningful results and in the last year, I’ve been systematically going through each step that needs to be done (e.g., I finished all the foreign databases over the summer).
With the DMSO series, there were six really big remaining tasks I needed to do, and over the last month, I’ve basically gone down a blackhole trying to read through and sort all of the results from these searches so I can compile a source document which will be sorted and then added into the later articles.
VF: Wow, that’s insane. How is it going?
AMD: It’s pushed me to my limits on a lot of different fronts, but it actually feels possible now, as I’ve finished the first two, and none of the remaining ones in theory should take as long as the first one did.
VF: It’s astonishing that there are that many studies, yet many people still insist there is “no evidence” that DMSO helps people. What are some of the most interesting things you’ve discovered so far in this current project?
AMD: The search has been worth it because I’ve been able to find a few key studies I was hoping existed (e.g., for male sexual health) but never would have been able to find through conventional keyword searches. At the same, part of the reason millions of papers reference DMSO is because it’s used for so many different things. Of those, three of the more memorable ones I recently found were DMSO being tested for how it interacted with race horses being illegally doped with cocaine, DMSO being used to greatly increase fiber optic internet speed (e.g., when mixed with a cable, it reduced resistance 83-fold) and DMSO refolding endogenous opioids to increase their potency (which is particularly relevant in chronic opioid use—something we’ve seen benefit from DMSO).
VF: It really seems to me that DMSO can fix just about everything in the body. What issues do you think DMSO is most suited for?
AMD: My entire motivation for writing this series has been to highlight what DMSO can do for strokes, brain injuries and spinal cord injuries in the hope that compiling a robust enough case for DMSO will facilitate the MAHA moment incorporating those therapies into the standard of care. I personally believe this is the single most important use for DMSO, as extensive evidence shows DMSO completely upends the existing paradigm that those injuries equate to a life of disability, suffering and death.
Beyond that, it’s hard to give a concise list on this, as I can now make a case DMSO works for hundreds of conditions throughout the body, but if I had to guess:
•Acute injuries, particularly blunt traumas, burns, sprains (and bug bites). I’ve read about numerous compelling ones, such as a six-year-old sticking her index finger into a live light socket where “the finger was cooked through and the tip burned ash white. After 20-minutes’ submersion in a DMSO solution, her pain was gone and by the next morning the finger was healthy pink and healing.” The most recent example I had of this was a large cat bringing in a small songbird yesterday which was still alive, me prying it out of the cat’s mouth, finding the bird was barely alive with a large puncture wound in the abdomen, at which point a few experienced people there told me not to bother with the bird as they expected it to die within the hour. I dabbed DMSO on its open wound, it rapidly came back and flew away within 20 minutes (which I was not expecting) and hit a window in the house, so I picked it up, gave it a little bit more DMSO, and gently held it till it seemed fine, then brought it outside, at which point it perched on me for a bit, said goodbye, and flew away.
•Pain and arthritis. The responses with this vary, as acute pain and neuropathic pain or arthritis in small joints tends to have the best response, while chronic pain, particularly psychogenic pain has a more variable response (i.e., you need more targeted applications of DMSO or the correct dosing).
•Using DMSO in combination with other natural (or conventional) therapies to bring them into the body. I’ve spent months going through this, and an almost endless number of options exist which allow people at home to cure a very wide range of medical conditions that would otherwise be challenging to treat even with conventional care (e.g., the DMSO cancer combinations are extraordinary, particularly with hematoxylin while other combinations are incredible for eliminating persistent infections that do not respond to other interventions). Of those, cosmetic applications have been the most extensively explored (as there is always a demand for that and some of the combinations have an extraordinary ability to restore the youth and vitality of the skin), but I feel the tip of the iceberg has been touched on that one.
•Chronic lung issues, ranging from asthma, to COPD and pulmonary fibrosis. I’ve also had a few reports of it essentially curing other terminal lung conditions (ie. doctors shared it saved lungs which had needed transplants either from scleroderma or cystic fibrosis), but I have too small of a sample set to be sure of those uses.
•Eye issues, as DMSO has a very unique affinity for the eyes. Of these, I’ve been the most struck by how well DMSO works for floaters, as a large number of readers have reported DMSO treated their floaters (with virtually no failures) and no good treatment exists within the conventional paradigm for them. You can also make a strong case DMSO is very helpful for other head issues (particularly ear, dental and sinus issues) and skin issues throughout the body.
Beyond that, there are also numerous fairly rare diseases that don’t have a good treatment and DMSO happens to be very helpful for.
VF: I was gobsmacked by the story of your reader who reclaimed their sight after being blind for 75 years. What other conditions were you surprised to discover that DMSO helps?
AMD: Murray’s story was astonishing, but understandable as I’ve repeatedly seen nerves that have been “dead” for year, if not decades come back to life after the correct therapy, and there are numerous stories Pat McGrady compiled from Stanley Jacob which are very similar to Murray’s. With the visual issues, the one thing I never expected to come across was someone curing colorblindness, as within the DMSO literature, the only case of this I ever found was colorblindness following a traumatic brain injury (which is a rare subset of colorblindness—and the only type I’d expect to respond to DMSO) but as it happened, one reader with classic color blindness emailed me about DMSO curing it.
However, the thing I’ve consistently been the most astonished by is DMSO treating Down Syndrome (both the developmental impairments and structural issues), as by everything I understood about medicine that should be impossible. Because of that, I went back and forth on mentioning this in the original DMSO article, but ultimately did because I not only found numerous studies documenting this but also Congressional hearings highlighting specific cases—which I felt were highly unlikely to have been fabricated. Since then I’ve had a few readers share they tried DMSO with or without amino acids and seen remarkable results similar to what I read in those studies. Beyond that, there are a lot of other conditions I could list that most people find astonishing (e.g., a fighter pilot contacted me to share an incredible ALS story Rebecca is trying to set up a trip to film, which mirrored what we’ve seen in numerous ALS patients have shared with us over the years).
VF: When you look at the evidence, what gives you the most hope about DMSO today?
AMD: From studying the forgotten sides of medicine, like many, I’ve concluded that people are much sicker now than they were in the past (e.g., more and more chronic diseases have appeared that previously did not exist). In parallel, I’ve noticed so many extraordinary therapies I’ve read about and then procured, while quite helpful, did not produce the same extraordinary results consistently reported at the time they were widely used. This I believe is due to the fact humanity’s vitality is much weaker now, so the body’s ability to heal, even with therapeutic support, also has greatly diminished. Given this, I’ve hence been quite surprised the results people are reporting with DMSO are quite similar to what people noticed in the 1960s. To me, this indicates DMSO’s therapeutic properties are able to directly antidote many of the factors that have been chronically sapping humanity’s vitality.
VF: How do you think DMSO works?
AMD: A lot of what people are reporting about DMSO makes sense to me, as I’ve worked with many other therapies which produce similar effects to DMSO and seen them produce extraordinary results in “incurable illnesses” (ie. I am familiar with numerous other therapies besides DMSO which can treat macular degeneration) but DMSO seems to be a more universal approach which can do all of the things each of these separate therapies do at a less intense degree than any of those therapies would do in their specific focus area. Because of this, it’s able to safely treat a wide range of issues, and then often can be combined with the stronger therapy I traditionally use for the issue if DMSO alone can’t do it (rather than forcing me to default to the stronger focused therapy)—which is very helpful.
In the series I’ve tried to highlight all the individual properties DMSO has that I think are essential for curing illness and restoring health (i.e., improving circulation, reducing inflammation, restoring normal protein folding and reviving dormant cells trapped in the cell danger response), however, none of the mechanisms I’ve come across seem to fully explain why DMSO is able to do so many different things. Presently, I’m forming a hypothesis DMSO is able to restore liquid crystalline water within the body (as many papers suggest this), which in turn could explain so many different effects it has (e.g., improving circulation, reviving dormant cells, rapidly healing wounds, differentiating cancer cells into non-cancerous ones or reactivating neural function)—but since I have not found anything that conclusively proves this, it’s still just a hypothesis.
VF: What have the doctors who have been using DMSO shared with you?
AMD: They are all astonished at how effective it is, and are rapidly finding it’s one of the best options they have for their patients (e.g., one shared they now give DMSO to 80-90% of their patients). At the same time, many are finding they like to use it for a subset of issues (ie. musculoskeletal problems) and then use it to augment the therapies they are already familiar with for other conditions (e.g., topical ivermectin has produced remarkable results for a large number of patients).
The major problem I’ve been running into is that each of them was initially eager for me to send patients to them from readers who reached out to me for DMSO doctor referrals, but they found their practices rapidly filled from word of mouth referrals the extraordinary results they produced. Because of that, I receive numerous requests each day from people who need DMSO referrals, many of whom my heart goes out to and I really want to send to one of the doctors, but I instead have to be incredibly selective at this point because there are only a few remaining personal favors I can ask.
VF: Is that why you’ve been so detailed with the articles?
AMD: Yes, my goal is both to give all the information practitioners need to feel confident treating patients with DMSO, but also for patients (at least those with the personality to be “early adopters”) to be able to start using DMSO without a physician’s guidance.
VF: What is the primary issues you’ve seen readers run into with DMSO?
AMD: The number one mistake I see far too many people make is using too high of a concentration of DMSO, particularly when nebulizing it. The exact dose varies from place to place in the body and individual by individual, so I’ve tried to write out the exact dosing instructions to follow, but I find in many cases, people just jump to a high dose regardless of what I say to do, and while high doses are great for some people they aren’t for others. So, I always instruct people to start low, be patient, and build up and have accepted all I can do is keep reminding people to do that.
Beyond that, other common issues include buying counterfeit DMSO brands (which I initially never imagined would become a problem due to how inexpensive real high-purity DMSO is), DMSO’s characteristic odor some people experience (which has a few different solutions I’m working on an article about) and temporary skin irritation. I believe IV DMSO also has a separate set of issues, particularly when too high of a dose is infused, but as very few people are presently doing this therapy (which is incredible for neurological conditions), that rarely comes up.
Also, while fairly rare, the more serious issues I’ve come across include: taking DMSO if you are allergic to it, applying DMSO to the skin after working with pesticides (there were a few non-fatal incidents of this in the early days of DMSO), taking DMSO if there is a severe pre-existing toxicity burden in the body (e.g., chronic illness from inhaling the Gulf War burn pits), and mixing it topically to the skin with something you are allergic to (i.e., one reader who did great with DMSO alone had a bad experience combining it with arnica—something a surprising number of people have allergies too).
That said, it’s been really surprising how few serious reactions occur, or that none of them were what I worried would happen to someone (e.g., someone accidentally putting it on the skin when something toxic was there or someone having an anaphylactic reaction). In contrast, I feel with virtually any other therapy, particularly a conventional drug, there would have been orders of magnitude more issues.
VF: Where can people find more information from you about DMSO?
AMD: On the index for my Substack, near the top, I’ve linked to each DMSO article. Within each article, after presenting the evidence for the specific condition, I include dosing and protocol information for using DMSO in each part of the body (e.g., the most recent eye article includes the most current information on using DMSO throughout the body). Since I’ve received so many DMSO testimonials, I’ve also been making a point to compile them here (please share your story there if you have one), and currently have over 5000, so readers can see the benefits I am attributing to DMSO really happen, and I’ve now heard of many fruitful connections occurring from someone reaching out to another reader who benefitted from DMSO.
VF: One of the things I’ve been the most struck by is how many people are now starting to promote and write about the subjects you’ve covered (like sunlight) using references and material they almost certainly got from you. How do you feel about that?
AMD: Spiritually, I believe it’s not good to covet and hoard things, so I never felt that the work I’ve compiled was “mine.” What I care about (and why I put so much effort into the Substack) is for the information to be able to reach the people who can directly benefit from it. If a gestalt of people each claim the ideas as their own and then promote them, it greatly amplifies the ability of the idea to get out there, particularly since it shifts the concept from being “AMD’s opinion” to a generally self-evident truth anyone can recognize from the existing evidence. About half of the people who re-use my material link back to me, which is really nice and an added bonus.
VF: Beyond that, what are the greatest challenges you’ve run into with the newsletter?
The primary one is time, because there are so many different things I want to do, even with help, it’s impossible for me to get to all of them. My overall goal with the Substack is to help lay the foundation for MAHA to get a few critical things done which RFK is still H.H.S. Secretary, so I am doing my best to tackle that massive task before the window closes. Because of this, I’m constantly having to skip doing things I want to do (e.g., before the Substack, I spent a lot of my free time answering health questions online for people), and I have a lot of fairly important real world commitments and obligations I’m running a very delicate balancing act with. If it was my choice, I would be spending most of my time treating patients, and the fact that I’ve had to somewhat dial back my clinical hours is something I’ve accepted but really wish was different, particularly given the nature of some of the cases that come to me in my community.
VF: One of the biggest dilemmas that every content producer faces is how long to make their material, and I credit my success to being able to effectively condense material into a format that can reach a lot of people and easily go viral. What has been your secret to navigating this?
AMD: I find that regardless of the length, it’s not right for certain subsets of readers, so the best solution I’ve found (which originated from Dr. Mercola’s advice) was to write a detailed (and referenced) article which comprehensively covers everything someone actually needs to know on a topic, after which I wrote abridged articles focusing on the key points for that article (along with many others like you extracting the key points they want to use from the longer articles).
VF: I’ve spoken to quite a few people who have been inspired to go into writing due to the reach of your newsletter. Do you have any advice for them?
AMD: We live in a world of outrage and clickbait and while that can clearly succeed, I really believe people want nuance, authenticity and being empowered to understand both sides of a subject rather than being told what they need to believe. I also feel the presence of mind when you write is very important, so despite all the information in here, I always try to ultimately focus on how the words feel (as I’m more of a heart than brain person).
I think all of that is why this newsletter has been able to succeed despite it not doing a lot of things publications are supposed to do to succeed, and I think a big part of why you’ve become one of the top people in this genre on Twitter/𝕏 is because beyond you being good at clipping things down to the relevant part, people can tell you care.
I mention all of this because AI has no heart, so as more and more people rely upon it, a larger and larger void will form in online content and that need for authenticity will grow and grow (e.g., we’ve spent a while exploring this with AI models that are trained on these articles and still have not been able to get them to produce anything with a comparable human feel). So, when writing, the focus has to be not only on ensuring the information is accurate (which is often impossible to do with a cursory look at the subject) but also really how it feels to receive what is conveyed.
Beyond that, feeling compelled to learn the Dvorak keyboard when I was younger (which allows you to type much faster and greatly reduces wrist strain and carpal tunnel syndrome) has been incredibly valuable for this endeavor and I probably would not be able to write anywhere near as much had I not done that.
VF: Do you have any parting advice to leave readers here?
AMD: Our culture has conditioned us to believe you need a doctor to be healthy. The reality is that a lot of medical conditions can be easily treated at home and my goal is to gradually lay the blueprint for how many well-known natural therapies can be relied upon for a myriad of illnesses. At the same time however, modern medicine is very good for certain issues, particularly life threatening ones, so if something you have is not responding to the natural approaches you are trying or something seems like an emergency, do not hesitate to seek out the care you need or go to the ER.
Likewise, I think it’s very important to never be too rigid about anything as it’s rare one side is ever entirely right. For instance, using the past example, people who completely avoid conventional medical care and people who depend upon it for everything each have bad outcomes which could have easily been been avoided with a more moderate position. Likewise, while I am seen as being very “anti-vaccine” I also feel that some vaccines are much more harmful than others, I also believe strong arguments exist for giving certain ones in certain contexts (e.g., rabies after being bit by a rabid animal).
In my own case, I never expected to be in the position I am now, and I think that beyond the luck I had to both have an extensive background in the areas people are now interested in and others with large platforms wanting to promote me, the only reason this newsletter has gone as far as it has is because of its focus on remaining balanced. As our world becomes increasingly chaotic, there is a greater and greater need for balance now in every aspect of our lives.
VF: I completely agree and wish our society could shift back to having more nuance on challenging issues. Before we go, is there anything people can do to help you?
AMD: I have been going through an exhaustive effort to collect DMSO stories and compile them here. If you have a compelling DMSO story and can share it on that thread, it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for reading. For more information about DMSO and a vast array of other health topics, subscribe to ’s Substack. This is easily one of the most valuable accounts you’ll ever follow.
Also, if you have a DMSO story to share, tap this link and post it here.
How do I find a doctor/provider who is skilled in the use of DMSO