Defending DMSO Part 2

The Therapy, the Practitioner, and the Pattern Behind the Smear

In Part 1, we put Medicine Girl’s two DMSO articles side by side with the book she paid extra to have signed. Six tests. Six contradictions. The kraft process she said was hidden was named in the first sentence of Chapter 1 and the carrier effect she said was concealed was the substance of an entire thirty-page chapter. The Stanley Jacob quotes that invert her entire framing were in the book, on the record and citable in three sentences — she did not cite them.

That was the case against her authorial position. This article does what she didn’t - it walks through what DMSO actually is, what it does, who Amandha Vollmer really is, and what it means that DMSO has now been added to the list of substances Medicine Girl is working to discredit.

A note on why we’re writing this. The rebuttal series started because customers were sending us her magnesium article and asking what to make of it. Her other articles have generated a similar flood of questions, so when we talk about who Medicine Girl is harming, we’re not talking abstractly. We’re talking about people who are reading her articles, getting frightened, and writing in to ask whether the things they’ve been using that actually make them feel better, are poisoning them. That is the context for everything that follows.

Act One. The Therapy

Stanley Jacob

Medicine Girl’s account of Stanley Jacob casts him as an unscrupulous professor recruited by a paper mill to legitimise a waste stream. The real story is quite the opposite.

Jacob was head of the Department of Surgery at Oregon Health and Science University. Before he ever encountered DMSO, he was a pioneer of organ preservation and transplantation, part of the team that performed some of the earliest kidney transplants in the United States.

His record before DMSO is worth noting, because Medicine Girl’s framing depends on its absence. He took his MD cum laude at twenty-four, having already collected Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Omega Alpha along the way — the markers of the top decile of his profession. The Markle Scholarship in Medical Sciences, awarded to a handful of researchers each year, came soon after. His internship, residency and three-year research fellowship were at Harvard Medical School, followed by chief residency in surgery at Boston City Hospital under Dr Englebert Dunphy. He served in Japan during the Korean War as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Medical Corps Reserve, decorated for his service. By the time he encountered DMSO, he had already published more than forty papers in peer-reviewed journals.

His interest in DMSO grew out of his cryopreservation research. Subsequently, the compound turned out to be one of the most important cryoprotectants ever discovered, which is why almost every laboratory in the world uses it to freeze cells, embryos, sperm, and tissue samples. The references list at the end of Medicine Girl’s own article is full of papers on DMSO as a cryoprotectant. She presents them as evidence against DMSO. They are actually evidence that her account of Jacob is wrong and that he was not found by Crown Zellerbach to make their waste look legitimate. He was already one of the most respected surgeons in America working on a serious problem in tissue preservation, and DMSO turned out to be useful for it.

What followed was a career-long defence of a compound he could not profit from. The patents existed but they were not on the molecule itself, which had been known since 1866 and could not be owned. Pharmaceutical companies refused to invest in the trials precisely because there was no money in something they could not patent and Jacob made no secret of this. Even the FDA’s own drug bureau director stated this openly. The reason DMSO is not in every hospital pharmacy is not that it is industrial waste, it is the opposite – it’s too cheap, too unpatentable, and too useful.

Jacob treated thousands of patients across his clinical practice. His laboratory was raided after a single negative animal study showed reversible lens changes at extreme injection doses, then his patient files were copied without warrants and he was charged with insufficient evidence. None of this is the behaviour of a regulator protecting the public from a dangerous compound, it is the behaviour of a system protecting itself from a therapy that threatens its business model.

That is the man Medicine Girl calls an unscrupulous professor. The man who lost his laboratory, fought the FDA for the rest of his career, refused to walk away and never stopped seeing patients.

The Aspirin Parallel

Medicine Girl’s central argument is that DMSO’s industrial origin proves it dangerous. By that logic, anything emerging from a pulp mill must be unfit for human use.

The pulp mill, though, is processing nature. The wood comes from trees. Lignin, the substance that holds plant cell walls together and is broken down during pulping, is what those trees produce, and the sulphur-containing compounds released as the lignin breaks down include DMSO — the same molecule that occurs naturally in marine phytoplankton, tea, coffee, wine, asparagus, clams, tomatoes, milk, and the atmospheric sulphur cycle that connects them all. The kraft process did not create DMSO, it only made it visible.

Apply Medicine Girl’s logic to aspirin and the gap becomes obvious. The active compound, salicylic acid, was isolated from white willow bark in the nineteenth century, but willow bark itself had been used medicinally for thousands of years — Hippocrates wrote about it for pain and fever, and the molecule the tree produces is the same molecule a chemist isolates from it. In 1897 Bayer synthesised a slightly modified version, acetylsalicylic acid, which was gentler on the stomach, and they produced it industrially under a trade name. The compound that emerged from Bayer’s industrial process is the same compound human beings had been chewing in willow bark for millennia, with one small chemical modification. Origin does not determine therapeutic value.

This is the part of her argument we found most cynical, because she knows it, or ought to. Anyone who has spent any time around natural medicine knows that the boundary between “natural” and “extracted” is not where she pretends it is. The argument only works if you do not think about it for long.

What DMSO actually does

Medicine Girl’s two articles reduce DMSO’s actions to two things: it produces a garlic taste in the mouth, and it reduces inflammation. She frames both as evidence of toxicity.

The actual mechanisms documented in the literature are considerably more extensive. DMSO acts as an anti-inflammatory through the same prostaglandin pathways as aspirin, without the gastric toxicity that makes long-term aspirin use dangerous. It blocks pain through nerve conduction, dilates blood vessels, and improves oxygen delivery to tissues. As a free radical scavenger it has been studied as a radioprotector, and it chelates heavy metals — binding aluminium, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and nickel for excretion. It has bacteriostatic effects, slowing bacterial reproduction at concentrations safe for human tissue, and has been documented to improve white cell function while increasing membrane permeability for toxin removal.

The garlic taste Medicine Girl names as evidence of poisoning is the smell of dimethyl sulphide, a metabolite produced when the body breaks DMSO down. The same compound is naturally present in tea, coffee, wine, asparagus, clams, tomatoes, milk, cooked corn, spearmint oil, and barley malt. It is produced by marine phytoplankton on a planetary scale and oxidises in the atmosphere as part of the earth’s sulphur cycle. Calling it toxic is calling the natural sulphur cycle toxic.

The thirty thousand citations on PubMed are not a marketing claim. They are the actual published literature, openly available on the National Library of Medicine’s own database. The literature exists and it documents what DMSO does. The only thing that is hidden is the translation of that literature into protocols ordinary people can use at home, which is exactly the work Amandha Vollmer’s book does.

The radioprotection record

DMSO has been documented in the published literature to protect DNA from the damage caused by ionising radiation, and to accelerate the repair of strand breaks once they have occurred. This is one of the most established findings in the radiation biology literature and the reason DMSO is used in laboratory radiation protection protocols. It is also why Amandha provides specific protocols in her book for use before medical imaging procedures.

The protocols are simple and they are public. One teaspoon of pharmaceutical grade DMSO in five ounces of distilled water, taken before a CT scan, dental X-ray, or mammogram. For full-body imaging, one ounce in one ounce of water, twice daily, for several days afterward.

The health freedom audience is increasingly aware of cumulative radiation exposure from medical imaging, dental work, and airport scanners. People are asking what they can do about it and DMSO is one of the few cheap, accessible, evidence-supported answers. Medicine Girl is attacking a real answer to a real concern. That is, in its own way, more damaging than her attack on DMSO as a therapy for joint pain or wound healing. Because the people most worried about radiation exposure are often people who already have reason to be — cancer patients, frequent flyers, people working in medical imaging, people who have had years of routine X-rays.

Act Two. The Practitioner

What Amandha actually teaches

Medicine Girl tells her readers that vendors and influencers have buried the safety information on DMSO. She presents the carrier effect as a hidden danger, thus painting Amandha as someone selling a dangerous compound while concealing the protocols.

Had she read Amandha’s book, she would have seen that she devotes thirty pages to safety guidance. Patch test first. Use pharmaceutical grade only, 99.95% purity, filtered through activated charcoal. Store in glass where possible, or in approved plastics if not (HDPE, polyethylene, PETE). Clean the skin thoroughly before application. Remove all synthetic fragrances, perfume, cologne, body lotion, aftershave, hairspray, and residues from laundry detergent or dryer sheets. Remove nail polish if applying with hands. Use natural bristle paint brushes rather than synthetic ones, which DMSO will dissolve. Do not use alcohol while taking DMSO. Do not combine with prescription drugs without medical supervision. Start with dilute solutions, typically 50%-70% in distilled water or aloe vera, and adjust based on skin response. Take breaks, one day off a month, one week off after six months. Avoid in pregnancy and breastfeeding. Avoid over tattoos, soft metals, silicone implants, or Botox.

This is not hidden information. It is the substance of an entire chapter in a book that is freely available, sold openly, and translated into multiple languages.

Fred Luchetti

Medicine Girl’s first DMSO article includes the full text of a cease-and-desist email from Fred Luchetti, representing Amandha’s business. She publishes it twice, in both articles, framing it as proof that Amandha is not censored, and as evidence she has hit a nerve.

Reading the email is the simplest way to understand what it actually was. It is a standard legal warning that identifies the article being objected to, requests removal of specific claims, and notes that ignoring the request will result in legal counsel being engaged. It is signed by name. Short, polite, and entirely conventional.

This is what legal correspondence looks like when a business notices that a piece of public writing is making demonstrably false claims about its products and the qualifications of its founder. A practitioner with 15,000+ subscribers and a published book on the subject has every reason to take such claims seriously, particularly when they include the kind of categorical positions Medicine Girl has since confirmed in the comments of her own article — that nothing added to the body can heal, that anyone selling such a thing is therefore a scam. Those are the claims Amandha’s business was responding to, and they are still being made.

Medicine Girl’s framing is that the letter proves Amandha is afraid of the truth. The simpler reading is that it proves Amandha’s business has lawyers, which is true of every business with a public profile and is no more remarkable than the fact that Medicine Girl herself moderates her own comment section. The cease-and-desist did not silence Medicine Girl. Both her articles remain published. She has, in fact, gone further in the second one. The letter did its job, which was to put a position on the record. That is what cease-and-desists are for.

The no-team pose

Medicine Girl mocks Amandha for having a marketing department of one person. She contrasts this with her own situation. “My departments and team consists of me, myself, and I.”

Medicine Girl runs a paid Substack with thousands of subscribers. She runs a tip jar through Buy Me a Coffee. She runs a joint venture with another writer called the Shadow Banned Library, which sells access to her work and the work of her collaborator. She has a website which sells a paid intake session, six-week and eleven-week paid programmes, a private membership, and retreats in South Africa, Baja and Molokai. She has, in short, an operation. A smaller one than Amandha’s, but unmistakably an operation that produces content, processes payments, manages subscribers, and sells products.

The framing she presents to her readers is me against the world. The reality is one business writing against another business. There is nothing wrong with running a business, the problem is the pretence that she is not running one. The grift-free pose only works if you do not look at the revenue model.

The sources she leans on

Medicine Girl’s second DMSO article includes a “further reading” section. The two sources named are GeoffPainPhD and Ray Horvath.

GeoffPainPhD is a writer active in fluoride and environmental activism. His track record on factual claims is contested. He is not a toxicologist. The post Medicine Girl links to is titled “Grok apologises to me over DMSO deaths.” The substance of the post is that Geoff Pain asked Grok, an AI chatbot, a series of leading questions about DMSO, until the chatbot agreed with him. He presents the chatbot’s sycophantic agreement as evidence of suppressed truths now coming to light.

A serious investigative journalist citing a chatbot’s agreement as proof of anything is a category of evidence with no precedent in any field. It is not even folk wisdom, which at least has time and repetition behind it. It is the output of a language model trained to agree with confident users, presented as journalism. Medicine Girl links to it approvingly, in a section she calls further reading.

It is worth saying what passes for evidence in this corner of the literature, because the readers writing in to us are asking. The single death repeatedly cited as proof of DMSO’s hidden toxicity is the case of a woman in Ireland in 1965. The case is documented in Pat McGrady’s history of DMSO, The Persecuted Drug, published in 1973. She had a prior allergic reaction to a hair-removing compound that had developed into an infection. She received five injections of penicillin and topical iodine to clear it. Five days before starting DMSO, she was prescribed an antidepressant. She applied DMSO topically for a sprained wrist and knee. On day one, she developed swelling of the tongue and throat. On day two, she applied DMSO again. Her relatives told her to call her doctor immediately, but she waited until day three. Sadly, she died shortly after seeing him. No autopsy was performed although multiple drugs were involved. The Squibb physician who reviewed the case could only say DMSO “may have” caused death. The Wall Street Journal headline at the time was “DMSO MAY HAVE CAUSED DEATH OF WOMAN.” That hedged sixty-year-old headline is what the entire “DMSO is dangerous” narrative rests on. One woman. Polypharmacy. No autopsy. A patient who ignored a clear allergic reaction on day one and used DMSO again on day two.

Ray Horvath writes under the title “The Source.” His post on DMSO, also linked approvingly, frames the substance as part of a wider depopulation agenda. Whatever the merits of Horvath’s broader work, he is not a clinician, a toxicologist, or a researcher with any documented engagement with the DMSO literature. He is a writer offering a worldview.

These are the two authorities Medicine Girl directs her readers to for further information on DMSO. A chatbot screenshot and a writer with no documented engagement with the literature. Set this beside Amandha Vollmer’s book, which contains over a hundred references to primary literature, decades of clinical experience, and a thirty-page safety chapter, and the asymmetry of evidence is not subtle. One side is doing the work. The other side is sharing screenshots.

Act Three. The Pattern

The pharmaceutical representative label

Medicine Girl calls Amandha a pharmaceutical representative twice in her second article. The reasoning is that DMSO is FDA-approved for one indication, therefore it is a pharmaceutical, therefore anyone recommending it is selling pharmaceuticals.

This is the rhetorical move that does the most work in her writing, and the one that survives the least scrutiny. There is barely a substance worth recommending — magnesium, vitamin D, iodine, B12, omega-3, folate — that does not have a prescription pharmaceutical form somewhere in the regulatory record. Vitamin D is calcitriol. Magnesium is administered intravenously in obstetric and cardiac emergencies. Omega-3 is prescription Lovaza. Iodine is stockpiled as potassium iodide for radiation exposure. Folate at therapeutic doses is prescription-only.

The label, applied consistently, would attach itself to every practitioner in the health freedom space. Including Medicine Girl, the moment she recommends sunshine — because cholecalciferol, which the body makes from ultraviolet light on skin, is a prescription drug.

The label does not expose Amandha. It exposes the entire health freedom toolkit, which is the position Medicine Girl’s own comment has now confirmed she has arrived at. No missing chemical can heal. The body needs nothing added. DMSO, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, supplements. The whole toolkit.

The playbook is sixty years old

One historical detail should be mentioned, because it bears on the pattern. When Stanley Jacob first presented his DMSO findings to his own faculty at the University of Oregon Medical School in the early 1960s, colleagues in the audience shouted at him from the floor. The three words they used, according to Pat McGrady’s contemporaneous account, were “Liar,” “Quack,” and “Charlatan.” Those three words, in roughly that order, are now being aimed at Amandha Vollmer by a writer who has read none of her sources and reviewed none of her clinical record. The playbook is sixty years old. The targets change. The words do not.

Burning the lifeboats

The strategic question, as the rebuttal series has developed, has narrowed to a single observation.

There is a large and growing population of people who have left the conventional medical system. Some left because of the COVID years. Some left after a bad personal experience with pharmaceuticals. Some left because they read books, talked to practitioners, did their own research, and decided the trade-offs no longer made sense for them. They are now using a toolkit that includes magnesium, iodine, vitamin D, B12, methylene blue, castor oil, DMSO, colloidal silver, chlorine dioxide, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and the wider catalogue of accessible interventions that have built the health freedom movement.

Medicine Girl, writing under the banner of that same movement, has now attacked every item on that list. There is, as far as we can tell, no substance left in the accessible toolkit that she has not attacked or expressed her intention to attack.

Whether she is a sincere believer who has fallen into nihilism, or whether she is something else, remains a mystery. The effect is the same either way. People who have left the medical system are being told their alternatives are poison and their lifeboats are being burned.

This is the part of the series we keep coming back to in conversations with customers and readers. The question is not whether Medicine Girl is right or wrong about any individual substance, though we have shown across this series that she is consistently wrong. The question is what her project amounts to. What is left when she is finished? Dirt and her Substack. Nothing else. No tool, no compound, no practitioner who has not been smeared.

This is not health freedom. This is the destruction of the freedom to choose anything other than nothing. And nothing, for someone who has actually been ill, is not a real choice.

That is where we are leaving DMSO. Amandha Vollmer’s book stands. Stanley Jacob’s record stands. The thirty thousand PubMed citations stand. The protocols, the clinical use, the veterinary record, the patients helped, our own experience, all of it stands, and none of it is hidden. The only thing that has changed is that someone has now publicly committed to convincing health freedom audiences that none of it is real.

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References

Vollmer, A. Healing with DMSO. Ulysses Press, 2020. https://ulyssespress.com/

Vollmer, A. Yummy Doctor Holistic Education. https://yummy.doctor/

Jacob, S. W. & Herschler, R. “Pharmacology of DMSO.” Cryobiology 23, 14–27, 1986. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3514137/

Ashwood-Smith, M. J. "Radioprotective and cryoprotective properties of dimethyl sulphoxide in cellular systems." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 141(1), 45-62, 1967. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5230120/

McGrady, P. The Persecuted Drug: The Story of DMSO. Charter Books, 1973 (revised 1979).

CBS News. “The Riddle of DMSO.” 60 Minutes, 1980.