Veteran runners can list off a litany of folk remedies and cures for running injuries, accompanied by stories about their successes or failures. One of the most talked about old-school treatments for running injuries that still crops up from time to time is a chemical called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO.
Anecdotes about its use describe swabbing the pure liquid over an injured area, using a specially-prepared solution of anti-inflammatories and DMSO, or applying a gelatinized form of the chemical directly to your skin.
Today we’ll be investigating whether there’s any scientific evidence to support using DMSO to speed recovery from running injuries or whether it’s just another snake oil treatment.
How does DMSO work?
Though it has a long history as an industrial solvent in the paper processing industry, DMSO came to prominence as a modern-day patent medicine in the 1960s, touted as a treatment for everything from cancer to arthritis to ankle sprains.
But unlike many other cure-alls in the alternative medical world, DMSO does actually have some unique chemical properties.
It is a colorless, oily liquid that exudes a very strong garlic-like smell, and (perhaps alarmingly) within a minute or two of being applied to your skin, this smell materializes as a buttery garlic or oyster-like taste in your mouth.
The reason this happens is that DMSO is exceptionally good at penetrating your skin and making its way into your bloodstream. This makes it attractive as a topical treatment for injuries, but also raises some health concerns.
Since DMSO is a good solvent as well, meaning it can dissolve many different substances and, because of its skin-penetrating properties, carry them into your bloodstream too.
This is good if the substance in question is a drug intended to treat an illness or injury, but bad if the substance in question is something toxic, like byproducts from paper processing leftover in the DMSO solution.
Even today, the full scope of the biological interactions that happen when DMSO is introduced into your body remain unknown. A 2003 review article by Nuno Santos and fellow biochemists in Lisbon, Portugal lists an enormous number of DMSO-mediated reactions in your body, affecting everything from cholesterol metabolism to protein folding and thyroid hormone function. Santos et al. also describe how DMSO has found some niche uses in treating a range of medical conditions in the bladder, brain, and intestines.
Given this, it’s practically unavoidable that DMSO accomplishes something when introduced into your body, but for runners, the real question is: “does it aid in injury recovery?”
Studies: Does DMSO speed up injury healing?
Despite numerous descriptions of DMSO’s use in treating acute or overuse injuries, I only uncovered one randomized trial using dimethyl sulfoxide to treat an overuse injury. It was a 1981 study by E.C. Percy and J.D. Carson which investigated DMSO solutions as a treatment for tennis elbow and rotator cuff tendonitis.
Though neither of these are running injuries, they are quite similar in terms of basic biology to Achilles or patellar tendonitis, two common running-related overuse injuries. Percy and Carson treated 40 patients with each injury; within the two groups, 20 patients were treated with a 70% solution of DMSO in water, and 20 were treated with a 5% solution as a control.
Percy and Carson’s study was a double-blind experiment, meaning that both the patients and the doctors who examined and treated them did not know what treatment was applied to whom. Because of DMSO’s distinctive smell, it would be nearly impossible to conceal the treatment groups from the patients and the doctors if one of the treatments had no DMSO in the solution at all. And if DMSO did have some medicinal value, there should be a dose-dependent relationship—that is, there should be some difference in benefits between the 5% solution and the 70% solution.
However, both in the patients with tennis elbow and with rotator cuff tendonitis, the concentrated DMSO solution made no significant difference in pain, tenderness, swelling, or range of motion when compared to the diluted “control” solution.
No follow-up studies were conducted to Percy and Carson’s findings, and given that their experiment was quite well-designed, it’s hard to argue with the results.
Other less rigorous follow-up studies echo the findings of Percy and Carson
- A more recent trial on using DMSO to treat knee osteoarthritis found no benefits compared to a true placebo
- 1986 review article described DMSO as having very few benefits even in veterinary medicine, despite its popularity as a liniment for race horses.
Conclusion
Because there’s no good evidence to support claims that DMSO speeds recovery from injury, and because it has some well-documented and powerful potentially negative side effects on the inner workings of your body, it’s best that you do not attempt to use it to treat injuries.
There’s far too much that isn’t known about how it might affect your body and far too little proof that it will do anything useful.
Even if DMSO was able to reduce inflammation, as many alternative medicine advocates claim, it wouldn’t be beneficial for runners as modern science has shown that most running injuries have nothing to do with inflammation in the first place! Instead of experimenting with an exotic and powerful chemical, you’re better off investing your time (and money) in treatments that have at least some scientific evidence backing them.
*As a side note, one of the reasons we go through great pains to present the actual research for as many injury treatment options as possible (and the reason we started this blog in the first place) is to not only help you run faster, but to ensure you stay healthy by avoiding all the conflicting and often harmful information available on the web these days.
Unfortunately, it’s all-to-easy to come across bad advice from authors/bloggers/runners that don’t conduct the proper research and simply express their opinions as fact, which could be dangerous. Products like DMSO do have a very high likelihood of negative side effects with NO evidence of actually healing running injuries.
So, articles you find written on treatment options and training ideas by those who don’t do the research (like this one) should be avoided. Always be safe in your quest to run faster and be the best runner you can be!
