Story at a Glance:
•Modern medicine acts as a sales funnel, where patients are seen for the minimum time necessary to refer them onward to lucrative services rather than identifying the root cause of their condition.
•Since back pain has multiple causes, 90% of low back pain is simply labeled “nonspecific,” the most common causes go unrecognized and patients are placed on a standardized escalation ladder instead, where almost every rung either misses the actual cause or worsens it (e.g., all the common pain medications have serious issues).
•Some spinal surgeries are necessary or offer tangible benefits. Fusions, the most lucrative ones, have repeatedly failed to outperform non-surgical care in randomized trials while carrying a host of common and serious complications, yet have become increasingly favored — a dynamic illustrated by an extensive investigation of one hospital that generated record revenues from high-volume neurosurgery while its own physicians resigned and departed in protest over what they described as inappropriate surgeries and unsafe conditions.
•Meanwhile, countries without the wealth to sustain a medical monopoly actively explored inexpensive alternatives, and Russia and Eastern Europe built an entire literature around treating disc herniations and radiculopathies with topical DMSO, including a placebo-controlled trial and national treatment guidelines. Hundreds of readers here have independently found the same thing, including many recovering from fusions that had already failed them.
•This article will detail why each step of the conventional pathway is dangerous, the forgotten approaches my colleagues and I have relied upon for decades to resolve neck and back pain without surgery and how DMSO specifically can be used in these instances.
DMSO succeeds precisely because it addresses many of these causes so it will often be applicable to the cause of the individual’s pain when utilized rather than being stuck focusing on a single molecular target like most pharmaceutical drugs.
However, that same non-specificity is also its ceiling. When DMSO produces a partial response rather than a complete one — the backaches resolve but the nerve pain persists, or the pain improves but the mobility does not — it almost always means one particular cause is dominant and needs something aimed directly at it.
In the remainder of this article, which as always doubles as an open forum for whatever questions have accumulated over the past month, I will cover:
•The specific DMSO protocols for spinal pain, drawn from both the Russian clinical literature and what readers here have worked out on their own, including concentrations, application sites, and what to combine it with.
•Why applying DMSO to the site of pain is frequently not enough, and how to reason out where it actually needs to go (along with how to dose and procure it).
•How we address the muscular, and ligamentous components of back pain (which are typically our primary approach), including in hypermobile patients.
•Methods we have found helpful for disc herniations.
•Simple at-home approaches which are often extremely helpful for neck and back pain.
