Race Horses

• DMSO has been used for years in horse racing as an application to reduce inflammation in horses' tendons, ligaments and joints. It was found that over time, DMSO even helped heal tendinitis in race horses, enabling them to prolong their careers and continue earning for their owners. In earlier times, these injuries would have forced retirement on these animals.
  
  

Preservative

• One of the earliest medical uses of DMSO was as an organ and cell preservative in organ transplant research and surgery. It was found that the substance enabled organs, cells and other transplanted tissues to remain viable outside the body for a longer time. Through this use, it was seen that the substance absorbed through the skin very quickly without damaging it, raising the possibility for other uses in medical treatment.
  
  

Topical Drug Delivery

• A unique quality of DMSO is its ability to help deliver other drugs into the body as it passes through skin and other membranes. DMSO can deliver drugs with specific chemical makeup like morphine, penicillin, corticosteroids and insulin, directly through the skin as a topical treatment, avoiding the need for injection or ingestion.
  
  The most common use for DMSO by far is as a topical analgesic. DMSO can be applied to the skin in areas of pain, such as a sprained ankle, and feel almost immediate relief. People who suffer from more chronic pain need to apply DMSO for a longer duration, most studies suggest six weeks, to see results.
  
  

Inflammation

• DMSO is often used as a treatment for inflammation and rheumatic conditions like scleroderma and arthritis, although the FDA has not specifically approved its use for arthritis as of 2009. DMSO is used topically and even intravenously to reduce inflammation in patients suffering from conditions as wide-ranging as ulcerative colitis, inflammatory genitourinary disorders, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic low back inflammation and any number of auto immune disorders.
  
  

Regulatory Approvals

• Historically, the FDA has not been actively in favor of DMSO, some say since the death of an Irish woman in 1965 who had been using it in conjunction with several other treatments. Her death was reported as due to an allergy to the substance but a clear cause was never found. Despite this, the FDA has turned down many proposals for clinical trials, specifically to test its effectiveness on arthritis. The FDA did, however, approve use of DMSO for interstitial cystitis in 1978.
  
  

Side Effects

• There is one main negative side effect with DMSO and that is an almost immediate and sometimes severe smell on the breath similar to garlic. This particularly and nearly universally unpleasant side effect has driven speculation that many pharmaceutical companies have steered clear of research on DMSO due to marketing challenges surrounding this bad breath smell.