by A Midwestern Doctor, Lew Rockwell:
The extensive evidence behind DMSO’s ability to regenerate spinal cord injuries, treat “incurable” back pain, and transform spinal medicine — and how to use it
Recently, I summarized approximately 2000 studies and 200 reader reports showing DMSO treats “incurable” CNS neurological diseases (including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, multiple sclerosis, seizure disorders, psychiatric conditions, and Down syndrome) through its foundational properties: improving all forms of circulation, reducing inflammation, protecting cells from lethal stressors, crossing the blood-brain barrier, and reawakening dormant cells. This article extends that work to the spine, where DMSO’s regenerative properties are perhaps even more dramatic.
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Remarkably, veterinarians have been using IV DMSO for spinal and neurological conditions in animals for decades. When a horse goes down and can’t get up from a severe neurological problem, IV DMSO is often standard practice. When a dog is hit by a car and paralyzed, many reports exist of IV DMSO routinely getting them walking again. Multiple veterinarians who contacted me described personally witnessing “miraculous recoveries” in paralyzed animals, and veterinary textbooks from the 1980s already listed IV DMSO protocols for brain and spinal cord injuries. Yet in human medicine, a spinal cord injury patient is told nothing can be done and to prepare for a life of severe disability.
This disconnect inspired Todd, the Air Force veteran with ALS featured in the previous article, to try IV DMSO in the first place. After reading about DMSO’s properties, he asked a veterinarian friend whether she ever used it intravenously on animals. She did: whenever an animal was down with a severe neurological problem and couldn’t get up. “Many times I can get the animal on its feet and start treating it,” she told him. Todd’s response captures the absurdity perfectly: “We’re using that for a severe neurological problem on an animal that can’t get up, but we’re not doing this for humans.”
As I will show, the answer to Todd’s question is not that DMSO doesn’t work in humans. It is that the FDA effectively prevented it from ever being properly tested, and the medical profession never looked at what veterinarians already knew.
Note: the night before I published this article, one DMSO doctor I correspond with shared with me “I just heard from my patient that he had a cow that was found down, completely unconscious with a heartbeat. He called his vet who told him to mix DMSO and saline and infuse it. Within 30 mins, the cow was back up like nothing happened and lived until they sold it off.”
Neural Regeneration
Nervous tissue is notoriously difficult to regenerate: damaged central neurons rarely regrow, and even peripheral nerves heal slowly and incompletely. This is partly because nerve regeneration demands that the cell’s internal scaffolding (microtubules) reassemble, new axonal processes extend over long distances, and stem cells mature into functional neurons to replace those that were lost. DMSO promotes each of these processes: it is one of the most potent known promoters of microtubule assembly, it drives diverse stem cells to differentiate into neurons, and it can transiently “reset” cells trapped in dysfunctional structural states (a critical DMSO mechanism that will explored in detail later in the next DMSO article).
In purified tubulin systems, DMSO lowers the critical protein concentration required for their assembly into microtubules 8- to 10-fold (from 9.4 μM to 1.1 μM), primarily by reducing the rate at which tubulin subunits detach from growing ends while leaving the attachment rate unchanged. At optimal concentrations (6-12%, with 8% identified as best), 10% DMSO enabled microtubule formation at protein concentrations as low as 1 mg/ml (conditions under which assembly otherwise completely fails), producing microtubules that were morphologically and chemically identical to normal ones (GTP-dependent, cold-sensitive, inhibited by colchicine and calcium) but lacking the microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs) that normally coat them, an important advantage in spinal cord injuries where MAPs are frequently damaged or lost.1,2,3 These results have been confirmed across numerous systems: DMSO enabled assembly from tubulin completely stripped of associated proteins,1 reversed the complete blockade of microtubule assembly caused by rotenone1 (a Parkinson’s-causing pesticide), facilitated polymerization without added nucleotide,1 dose-dependently slowed disassembly,1 promoted rapid self-organization into polarized assemblies in Xenopus egg cytosol,1 progressively stabilized microtubules against cold-induced depolymerization at higher concentrations,1,2,3 modified lattice structure to promote more stable and organized spiral assembly,1,2 and greatly stimulated assembly in cobalt-containing systems.1
Most notably, plant protoplasts (cells with their walls removed) that had completely lost their cortical microtubule networks and were unable to divide were treated with 2-7% DMSO. Within hours, DMSO reinstated a dense, three-dimensional cortical microtubule network visible by immunofluorescence as long microtubule bundles with increased tubulin content. This structural restoration triggered continuous cell divisions that had never occurred under any other conditions, and the effect was so robust that unlimited tissue could be generated from protoplasts that had never produced even a single colony in control experiments. DMSO outperformed all other microtubule-stabilizing compounds tested (and a separate study confirmed that even 1% DMSO dramatically promoted early cell divisions, with 10-45% division rates vs. approximately 5% in controls).
