I have a formal education in chemistry and chemical engineering and am now retired after spending more than 30 years performing research at a national laboratory. During that time I developed a personal fascination with the potential of nutritional supplements for helping a broad range of physical and mental problems. It started when I was on the board of directors of a youth home with 70 problem children (wards of the court) and wanted to explore possible approaches for helping the children.
This gradually led me into making a serious study of nutrition, biochemistry, medical physiology and psychology and the interrelation between them. I was deep into studying textbooks and performing literature searches on Medline (on the Internet) when I first met Barbara. She was the secretary for the new group I had joined at the national laboratory. I found her to be an exceptionally pleasant person with an exceptionally serious, disabling illness.
So, I told her that I would use the capabilities I had developed to try to find something that might help her. I was proud and shocked when the first suggestion I made, derived from my first technical analysis of the cause of Crohn's Disease, was totally successful.Upon starting the literature search I quickly discovered that the conventional treatment for CD used steroids or sulfa drugs with only moderate success. Failure of the steroids frequently resulted in the need for surgeries removing the damaged part of the intestine. Multiple surgeries eventually end with the need for an ileostomy or a colostomy where excretion of the feces is diverted through the abdominal wall and is collected externally in a bag for disposal. Many other treatments had been tried with little success.
The attempts at different treatments seemed almost random, possibly because there was no clear understanding of the cause of the disease. Some believed it was an autoimmune disease, but the evidence for that was not conclusive.I decided to take a more logically tight, systematic approach, as I would do with one of my typical research projects.
This involved first postulating a damage mechanism, checking it against the literature to see if it survives, and designing what should be a logically tight treatment based on the assumed mechanism. In order for me to have any chance of success with my extremely limited access to almost anything sophisticated, I knew I had to approach the problem with a very different thought process than the elaborate research facilities had. The first thing I did was to mentally separate the primary, complex cause of the disease from the damage mechanism, which I hoped may not be so complex. I then focused on the damage mechanism, which I hoped would be more amenable to a simple solution. I reasoned that the damage mechanism was very likely hydroxyl radical attack on the intestinal cells.
From reading the medical literature, I discovered that there was considerable evidence that this mechanism might be a primary cause of colon cancer. They are well known to have the capability of destroying cells through oxidative attack and I thought Crohn's Disease might be another expression of their damage. A literature search identified more than 15 publications in the last five years in which the authors also felt this might be true.In a previous Medline literature search I had done on DMSO, focused on evaluating its toxicity, I discovered not only a lack of toxicity but also that it had been measured to be a powerful antioxidant.
The search over the previous five years of medical publications yielded 1117 abstracts describing instances where DMSO was used. Many of the abstracts openly stated that DMSO was a well-tolerated material, and there were no publications indicating any level of toxicity. DMSO had been used in a variety of medical applications, but never for Crohn's Disease. One paper presenting results for a number of materials being tested for antioxidant activity, listed the compounds in order of antioxidant effectiveness and then added the statement that none of them were as effective as DMSO.DMSO has another very important feature that distinguishes it from commonly used vitamin antioxidants. It will rapidly diffuse through the skin into the blood stream. (There is no need or advantage to taking it orally.)
According to my initial theory, this is not just an application convenience, but an essential feature that would make it more effective in the treatment of CD than other antioxidants.I reasoned that if the damaging hydroxyl radicals are generated inside the intestinal cells, the antioxidants will have to penetrate the cell membranes to get at them. Vitamin antioxidants can have a difficult time penetrating the membranes, which may explain why they are ineffective for treating CD. However, DMSO cannot be stopped by any membrane.
That is why it can rapidly diffuse directly through the skin. Thus, only DMSO (and now a second material with a slightly different mechanism, Melatonin, which I will discuss below) would be able to penetrate the cell membranes rapidly and quickly enough to deactivate damaging hydroxyl radicals generated inside the cells before they do damage.
I postulated that because of this very unique penetrating characteristic, only DMSO, and now Melatonin, might be effective in reducing the intestinal damage associated with Crohn's Disease. If my theory is true, treatment with DMSO would also serve to illuminate the biochemical cause of CD.With these thoughts in mind, I thought DMSO had a reasonable chance of helping Barbara with her CD. When I talked to her about it, she told me that she had owned horses for many years and was quite familiar with DMSOs frequent use in veterinary medicine. She felt it would be a safe thing to try, in small amounts, even though she was aware that its use for application to humans had been approved by the FDA only for the treatment of interstitial cystitis. She consulted her physician and he thought it could safely be applied topically.
When Barbara started using DMSO she was working half days because she was trying to recover from repair surgery and the deterioration caused by a major relapse of her disease. She went home at noon, as usual, and bought some DMSO at a health food store. She applied "about a teaspoon full or less" to her abdomen. (The body location is not important!) She then went to an afternoon movie. An hour into the movie Barbara noticed that something was missing. Most of her abdominal pain was gone! Shortly thereafter Barbara was able to return to work full time and was feeling "wonderful".
After this success, I am amazed at how many people then called me to find out about it. I discovered that this horribly painful, commonly fatal disease is very prevalent. I am thus compelled to write this paper in an attempt to get this information into the Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis community so it can be further evaluated, and hopefully provide near-term, safe help.If my theory is correct, DMSO does not stop the primary cause of Crohn's Disease. It only stops the damage mechanism, very rapidly.
Thus, DMSO may have to be used on a continuing basis. The people using it so far apply it only when they feel the onset of abdominal pain. The DMSO quickly stops the pain (and the intestinal damage process) commonly in less than one hour but it can take up to a few days of repeated application. One of the benefits of its rapid action is that it does not have to be taken in a preventive mode, and there are no withdrawal problems. This is in contrast to the steroid treatment, which takes several weeks to take effect and thus often has to be taken in a preventive mode, and where withdrawal must be done with great care.
The natural course of Crohn's Disease is to cycle between active and remissive states. The DMSO appears to prevent damage during the active state, and may be required sporadically during remission. It appears to be an extremely affordable remedy that a person can live with comfortably. I recently talked to Barbara and she said it continues to control her CD when it becomes active, but she had to use it only twice in the last year.
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