The DMSO-tea tree oil combination is a powerful natural cure for mesothelioma, basal cell carcinoma, and melanoma, but in this article, we discuss some of the caveats to consider if you decide to combine DMSO with essential oils. The results aren't always what you'd expect.How to Use DMSO With Essential Oils
Dimethyl sulfoxide, sometimes also spelled as Dimethylsulfoxide or abbreviated as DMSO, is an FDA-approved medicine that has a toxicity level similar to that of water, but also the broadest medicinal action of any other FDA-approved substance. DMSO is a powerful medicine by itself, but one of the reasons why it is rarely used by doctors or promoted by Big Pharma is because DMSO potentiates other medicines and substances. In fact, DMSO does so many different things that sometimes, it can be hard to predict how DMSO will behave, especially in combination with other substances. While many people regularly use DMSO with Chlorine Dioxide Solution with great success and while many people combine DMSO with essential oils, a quick survey of the scientific literature regarding the behavior of DMSO with different essential oils readily shows that essential oils combined with DMSO don’t always yield predictable results.The idea of a medicinal agent that enhances the effects of other medicines is compelling and a lot of our readers are intrigued by the idea of it. Indeed, I thoroughly enjoy looking into research about what DMSO can do when it’s combined with other medicines because each new combination that I learn about that works against some type of disease is like a completely new medicine and usually, very few people are aware that the combination exists. But DMSO is a medicine that’s not to be trifled with. Some of the medicinal effects of DMSO are not consistently reliable in all cases and there are situations when it might be better to NOT use DMSO to treat certain diseases. Many oils including essential oils, are skin-penetrating enhancers by themselves. To add DMSO in combination with the essential oils that are already able to easily pass into the human body without some scientific knowledge as to what the specific DMSO-essential oil combination might do inside the body creates more risk for the patient. In other words, if people are experimenting on themselves, this is one situation where anecdotal evidence might not be enough to support the use of DMSO plus essential oils.
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Research is ongoing on this topic and below, we outline the process that we used to research the use of DMSO to treat Staphylococcus aureus as a case study in self-doctoring at home with the substance. We talk about the use of DMSO to treat Staphylococcus more below.
Essential oils are hot right now. Personally, I love essential oils conceptually. I love to hold the little bottles in my hands and I love to smell them. I love to have them lined up on a shelf. But in reality, I don’t often use essential oils. As someone who collects medicines from different parts of the world, it would be odd for me not to have at least a small collection of essential oils on hand. But in practice, essential oils are often not as useful as whole herbs and they don’t travel well (despite a strong effort, I’ve never made it to my destination by plane with essential oils totally intact in their carrying case).
Lydi and I have speculated about this and I believe that though essential oils can be used as powerful medicines, much of the information that’s available to the public is “soft”. In other words, the information is aimed at people who aren’t necessarily willing to spend a lot of time studying the material. So, while there are scientific studies demonstrating that various essential oils are specifically valuable for the treatment of certain serious diseases, the people who are using essential oils the most, don’t have this information available to them and they also don’t know how to find this information.
Personally, I prefer to use whole herbs rather than using essential oils for the treatment of disease except in rare situations because whole herbs are cheaper, easier to find throughout the world, and most of the herbs that I work with have been in wide use for thousands of years. Essential oils are very different from the herbs they’re derived from and though, again, I really love the concept of essential oils, they’re often composed of a completely different configuration of medicinal substances than the whole herb. In some ways, essential oil use can lead to the same problems that the use of medicinal substances that have been isolated from the whole plant can cause. So this is just food for thought for anyone who is interested in DMSO-essential oil combinations.
Essential oils are a relatively new arrival on the self-medication scene. While herbs can be grown right outside my front door, essential oils require processing which means that I have to purchase them from a corporation that likely cares more about its profits than about me and my family’s health. I have similar issues with probiotics as the administration of probiotics is something that essentially falls under the control of Big Pharma, the Great Creator of Gut-Health issues that many people seek to resolve using probiotics. Whole herbs contain the volatile oils that we now call “essential” oils because they’ve been marketed to the public as “essential”. For people who are looking to learn how to do self-doctoring at home for friends and family, essential oils actually create the illusion that we’re dependent on a big corporation for medicine (unless we’re distilling our own essential oils at home, at this). My goal is to help people become empowered in terms of their self-care and, to the extent that essential oils help in this effort, I wish to include them in conversation. But at this moment in time, our understanding of essential oils is somewhat limited and our ability to make essential oils at home easily is limited to those who have access to land and a large quantity of herbs.
DMSO and Essential Oils
DMSO is a powerful solvent which means that it easily combines with other medicines and substances. This characteristic of DMSO can either be a blessing or a curse depending on your willingness to learn how to use this substance. If you combine DMSO with a medicinal agent, its action as a solvent can be extremely useful. But if you administer DMSO while taking prescription medications at the regular dose or if you put DMSO on your skin after bathing in soap products that contain toxic fragrances or other chemicals, this solvent-capability could be a very bad thing that could kill you. If you don’t give DMSO the respect that it deserves, this miraculous medicine can cause problems in an insidious way.So on the one hand, you have a group of people who love essential oils because they have the word “essential” in them (which implies that you need them), because they’re fun to hold in your hand, they smell good, and they feel like a natural product, but on the other hand, you have DMSO. DMSO is a substance that requires actual study to avoid causing damage to people.
DMSO also has the ability to easily penetrate not just through the skin, but through all of our human tissues and cells to easily gain access to areas of the body that are normally off limits. For example, the liver often is a haven of protection for infectious pathogens that find safety there from antibiotics. The liver, after all, metabolizes and breaks down antibiotics which means that the liver tissues themselves often are vulnerable to colonization (which is just slightly different than “infection”). But DMSO can take medicines directly into the liver so that the liver can be treated for infection. As long as you exercise care and you make sure that DMSO is not combined with toxic chemicals from your personal care products, sunscreens, or unfiltered tap water (which may contain toxins like fluoride or bromide among other things), combinations of DMSO with certain other medicines can yield powerful, new medicines that are able to treat diseases that are otherwise untreatable using other forms of medicine.
To be fair, scientists do combine DMSO with essential oils to study these combinations, but often DMSO is a part of scientific studies because of its ability to act as a solvent, not because of its other known medicinal attributes. Why is this the case? Because if DMSO became widely used in medicine, it would destroy Big Pharma. And Big Pharma funds the science that makes the healthcare system turn. So it’s very hard to find legitimate scientific studies that are actually looking at how an essential oil behaves in the human body when combined with DMSO. This is just something to keep in mind as you work with DMSO and/or essential oils.
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DMSO and Tea Tree Oil: A Case Study for DMSO Newbies
In this discussion, we outline some of the ways in which DMSO can be used with Melaleuca alternifolia / tea tree essential oil based on scientific studies. Studies have already confirmed that DMSO and tea tree oil can be used together to successfully cure mesothelioma, basal cell carcinoma, or melanoma, as well as other forms of cancer. These studies were actually looking at the combination of DMSO with tea tree oil for the purposes of curing a human disease. We’ve provided a recipe for dosing DMSO and tea tree oil for cancer based on the scientific literature below.
In addition to discussing the use of DMSO with tea tree oil to cure basal cell carcinoma, mesothelioma, or melanoma, we also discuss some of the other scientific studies that we could find where tea tree oil was combined with DMSO.
Dimethyl sulfoxide is an amphipathic molecule that combines well with substances that are not water-soluble. In other words, DMSO can be combined with essential oils because oils are not water soluble, but it isn’t always wise to combine an essential oil with DMSO as the final results can be toxic or rather unpredictable. Let’s talk about some of the caveats involved in using DMSO and essential oils by using tea tree oil as an example below.
Why Studying the Science of Combining Essential Oils with DMSO Is Vital
Scientific studies that examine the use of tea tree oil and DMSO elucidate a problem that might seem counterintuitive to those who are studying DMSO as a medicinal agent with a lot of potential as a treatment for drug-resistant disease. If we look at tea tree oil as a case study in combining DMSO with essential oils, we see that, in fact, there are times when this combination of medicines (DMSO and essential oils) yields powerful treatments that are incredibly effective. But surprisingly, we also see situations where DMSO in combination with essential oils or other medicinal agents, is decidedly not the right choice.For example, one example in the scientific literature involves a woman who used DMSO and tea tree oil to treat diabetic foot / gangrene / necrotizing fasciitis / flesh-eating bacterial disease. Certainly this woman thought that she was doing something smart by treating this wound at home using a relatively non-toxic essential oil and DMSO. In reality, this woman’s creativity in using these medicinal agents was actually based on sound logic. It makes a lot of sense to think that tea tree oil combined with DMSO would work to cure a severe skin infection, since studies have in fact shown that this is the case. DMSO can be used to improve the effectiveness of certain pharmaceutical antibiotics. But in this particular situation involving gangrene / diabetic foot the tea tree oil with DMSO made things worse. Click here to read more about the citric acid, bacteriophage therapy, and Palo de Campeche cure for gangrene. As a general rule, studies show that DMSO should not be used to treat gangrene / diabetic foot. While DMSO is an amazing healer that might be able to prevent gangrene or diabetic foot in the first place if applied to a wound right after the wound occurs, a wound that’s already infected might be better treated using citric acid or Palo de Campeche. Indeed, even Chlorine Dioxide Solution (CDS) should not be used to treat diabetic foot or gangrene because the bacteria that cause this type of infection actually love the extra reactive oxygen species provided by CDS. Yet another example that defies the logic of DMSO is amoebic infection. If a patient has an infection with some type of amoeba, DMSO can actually cause the amoeba to form cysts that are then resistant to medicinal agents combined with DMSO. So while, for example, tea tree essential oil has amoeba-killing abilities, its medicinal strength against an amoeba is not enhanced by DMSO. Amoeba recognize DMSO as a potential threat and they go into a protective state which means that while treating an amoebic infection with tea tree oil might actually work, if you combine the tea tree oil with DMSO, you diminish tea tree oil’s effectiveness (as well as the effectiveness of other forms of treatment that you might wish to try). It would, thus, be better to treat an amoebic infection with tea tree oil by itself rather than combining it with DMSO.
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If you’ve studied DMSO, these “edge-cases” may hijack your confidence in this medicinal agent, but don’t lose faith! DMSO is still an amazing medicine with huge potential for self-doctoring at home if you’re willing to learn how to use it safely. Read this chapter to gain a greater respect for DMSO as a versatile medicine, but also read this chapter to better understand the dynamic between DMSO and essential oils. A lot of people today combine DMSO with essential oils at home without doing due diligence to determine whether DMSO can treat a particular disease or whether or not it can combine safely with the essential oil in question. It’s important that we address this problem.
These edge-case situations are confusing because, again, they defy the logic of DMSO and how it works in the body. For those of you who are reading this discussion because you do self-doctoring at home, be aware that there are edge case scenarios when combining a medicinal agent with DMSO actually renders the final product less effective for some reason. This is why we developed a database of DMSO protocols that are based on science rather than on intuition. When you or a loved one is suffering from a disease, you might be tempted to get experimental with DMSO do some creative doctoring by combining it with different agents, but that doesn’t always work to create a more effective medicine. It can, in fact, have devastating consequences. Do your research first before making DMSO essential oil combinations (or before combining DMSO with other medicinal agents) to stay on the safe side.
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Why DMSO Should NOT Be Used Blindly: How to Research DMSO and Essential Oil Combinations
On the basis of the scientific studies that we detail below that show that Melaleuca alternifolia combines well with DMSO to penetrate cancer cells to cure mesothelioma, basal cell carcinoma, or melanoma without toxicity, we did additional research to learn more about how tea tree oil could be administered topically to cure skin diseases. We found that the exact same substance studied as a cure for basal cell carcinoma, mesothelioma, and melanoma, terpinen-4-ol has also been studied as a cure for MRSA.This was encouraging and we wondered if perhaps DMSO could be combined with tea tree oil to make an even more powerful, more reliable cure for MRSA. Our logic was that if terpinen-4-ol is a component of tea tree oil that has been used to cure MRSA naturally, and if DMSO combines easily with terpinen-4-ol in tea tree oil, then combining DMSO with tea tree oil might be a good combination treatment for MRSA at home.
One scientific study looked at the antimicrobial effects of terpinen-4-ol as a component of tea tree oil against Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) as a skin disease. This study examined tea tree oil and the terpinen-4-ol component against coagulase-negative staphylococci. By itself, tea tree oil exhibited strong activity against both MRSA and coagulase-negative staphylococci.
Again, this was encouraging, so we continued to look for more data.
The study above showed that tea tree oil was less effective as a whole oil product than the isolated substance terpinen-4-ol, but the study did not look at the combination of tea tree essential oil and DMSO.
We wanted to find out if DMSO could be combined with tea tree oil to make the tea tree oil more powerful and more targeted against Staphylococcus aureus infection. That’s how DMSO works, after all. It can make medicinal agents more targeted and it can enhance their strength. Makes sense, right?
In the studies that we talk about below that examined the use of tea tree oil with DMSO as a cure for cancer, terpinen-4-ol was the most important substance that produced a medicinal effect against tumors. And while tea tree oil by itself was not able to cure mesothelioma, basal cell carcinoma, or melanoma, it was able to cure these diseases when combined with DMSO. So, in a situation involving a patient with basal cell carcinoma, melanoma, or mesothelioma, DMSO and tea tree oil work together as you’d expect to make a “super-medicine” to overcome melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, or mesothelioma specifically. That’s incredible, right? I mean, we can’t ignore that this is a miracle, but we also can’t assume that the DMSO-tea tree oil combination will work to treat all diseases in the same way.
Lydi and I continued looking at the research to find out if tea tree oil and DMSO could be used to treat MRSA at home.
As a penetrating solvent, DMSO combines with tea tree oil and terpinen-4-ol to penetrate the protective sheath surrounding cancer cells. It seemed likely, then, that this combination of DMSO and tea tree oil would also be able to overcome a drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus skin infection. This seems logical because the research says that DMSO can penetrate through the sheath that protects cancer cells and it combines well with the same substance (terpinen-4-ol) that’s toxic to Staphylococcus aureus. But we weren’t finished with our research yet. At this point, things looked promising, but we hadn’t finished collecting data.
We did yet some more research to try to find a study looking into the use of DMSO with Melaleuca alternifolia against Staphylococcus infection, but found nothing. So we then did research into DMSO as a stand-alone therapy against Staphylococcus aureus infection. Maybe, if we could prove that DMSO by itself is toxic to Staphylococcus aureus, we could safely surmise that a combination of DMSO and tea tree oil would be a super-medicine.
We found that DMSO is a common cryopreservation agent that can theoretically be used to store Staphylococcus aureus at very cold temperatures. DMSO is used, after all, to store transplant organs prior to transplantation so it is a well-known cryopreservation agent. The study we read said that once the DMSO is raised to room temperature, it kills 99.52% of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria within 72 hours in a petri dish. Wow… 99.52% is a high percentage! We were almost ready to close the book on this topic and say that DMSO and tea tree oil would be a good combination for Staph infection. Heck, even at freezing temperatures, an initial kill rate of 80% is expected for DMSO cryopreservation of Staphylococcus bacteria. After the DMSO is raised from a freezing temp to room temperature, another 99.52% of the bacteria are killed. But there was a problem with this study. Scientists were looking only at whether or not DMSO would kill Staphylococcus aureus in a petri dish.
In this cryopreservation study, this Staphylococcus-killing effect of DMSO held true for both Methicillin Susceptible Staphylococcus Aureus (MSSA) and Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) infection. This seemed pretty encouraging to us, so we did a little more research…
Eventually, we found a study done in 1981 on DMSO and Staphylococcus aureus infection demonstrating that DMSO actually inhibited the killing of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria inside the body.
Wait. Back up.
That’s right, DMSO actually protected Staphylococcus aureus from being killed after being administered to a human being. So DMSO essentially is a powerful anti-Staphylococcus aureus agent when administered in a petri dish, but inside the body, it behaves differently. How is that possible?
This is one of the paradoxical problems of working with a medicinal agent with an extremely broad range of action. Sometimes, the various medicinal activities have surprising and unpredictable effects inside the human body.
As it turns out, according to this 1981 study, DMSO scavenges for hydroxyl radicals that are released by our white blood cells. Hydroxyl radicals are powerful reactive oxygen species medicines that can be administered via food grade hydrogen peroxide or they can be produced naturally in the body by the immune system’s white blood cells. Hydroxyl radicals are a front line of defense against pathogens, but DMSO, when administered as a stand-alone medicine, actually scavenges for these tiny molecules, thereby reducing the effectiveness of our white blood cells against Staph infection.
So, after all of this encouraging research, Lydi and I still found, at the end of it all, that DMSO is NOT the right medicine to use when dealing with a Staphylococcus aureus infection on the skin or inside the human body. Indeed, if you combine DMSO with tea tree oil to treat a Staphylococcus infection, you may actually negate the positive effects of the tea tree essential oil.
That being said, however, DMSO may be intentionally combined with a reactive oxygen species medicine like food grade hydrogen peroxide or chlorine dioxide solution. DMSO picks up reactive oxygen species like the hydroxyl radical and the superoxide anion to take them deep inside the body and to make them more effective. While combining DMSO with tea tree oil may or may not actually work to kill Staphylococcus aureus infection, it’s probable, or at least possible that DMSO plus CDS or DMSO plus food grade hydrogen peroxide would work to kill Staphylococcus aureus.
If you’re self-doctoring at home, you need to be aware of these edge-cases when working with DMSO in particular because you have few or no diagnostic options to find out what kind of infection you have. Often, people who self-medicate (myself included), use powerful, broad-spectrum medicines to also diagnose their disease in a sense. They may not know the name of the exact microorganism infecting their body, but rather, patients can note that the microorganism is either sensitive to the medicine that they administer or that it is not sensitive to it. Just be aware that if DMSO does not speed healing, it may be because it is having some kind of paradoxical effect on the disease.
Scientists have even studied tea tree oil in terms of its ability to induce resistance to antimicrobial agents with repeated administration at varying doses. The scientists found that there was no evidence suggesting that tea tree essential oil causes drug-resistance (or in this case, essential oil resistance). That’s great news for tea tree essential oil. As such, tea tree oil administration does not come with the same dangers as antibiotic administration in terms of drug-resistance. But, though DMSO is an agent that is famous for its ability to overcome drug-resistant bacterial infection, there are situations where it may actually enhance infection. It’s very hard to predict whether it would make matters better or worse if you combine it with tea tree essential oil against a Staphylococcus infection. So you have to do your research or you have to succumb to experimentation on yourself or your loved ones.
This blow-by-blow of our research efforts into DMSO for Staph infection is important in shedding light on the idea that DMSO requires some study and research to use it properly in a medicinal context at home.
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Cure Mesothelioma Naturally / Cure Melanoma Naturally / Cure Basal Cell Carcinoma Naturally with Tea Tree Essential Oil and DMSO: Scientific Study
In one ground-breaking study, tea tree essential oil was combined with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) to create a mixture that was then added to a carrier oil (such as apricot kernel oil) such that the tea tree oil and DMSO mixture was present in a 10% concentration. In other words, the scientists in this study combined 99% pharmaceutical grade DMSO with a high-quality, pure Melaleuca alternifolia essential oil product to produce a mixture that was 50% DMSO and 50% Melaleuca alternifolia. A carrier oil such as a cold-pressed, organic apricot kernel oil or a cold-pressed, organic grapeseed oil was then added to this DMSO-Melaleuca alternifolia mixture with 9 parts carrier oil and 1 part DMSO-Melaleuca. We recommend either apricot kernel oil or grapeseed oil because these oil also are powerful anti-cancer oils that combine well with DMSO.Both apricot kernel oil and grapeseed oil are safe for use with DMSO and can be combined with essential oils to dilute the concentration of tea tree essential oil. This study used the tea tree essential oil and DMSO plus carrier oil mixture to cure skin cancer using topical application. The treatment was applied to the tumor four times per day. Scientists observed that the mixture caused subcutaneous mesotheliomas, basal cells carcinomas, and melanoma to regress and stop growing. The anti-cancer effect of this medicinal mixture was accompanied by skin irritation, but as soon as the treatment was discontinued at 10 days, the skin irritation cleared and skin issues resolved.
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This study was able to show an influx of white blood cells and other immune effector cells to the treated area with no systemic toxicity. In comparison with pharmaceutical chemotherapy agents, the tea tree essential oil and DMSO combination was remarkably effective with only mild side effects that completely resolved after treatment. This mixture of DMSO and tea tree essential oil plus a carrier oil was able to inhibit the growth of aggressive, subcutaneous, chemotherapy-resistant tumors.
Click here to read more about low-dose chemotherapy that uses DMSO to potentiate the effects of chemo in no-chemo and no-radiation cancer treatment facilities. This treatment is called “DPT” and it comes with side effects that simply don’t exist when you use DMSO with natural substances like tea tree essential oil. Nonetheless, DPT is a good example that shows how Big Pharma medicines can be combined with DMSO to make those medicines stronger, yet less toxic.
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How DMSO and Tea Tree Oil Work to Cure Mesothelioma Naturally: Scientific Study
A different scientific study examined why Melaleuca alternifolia works to cure melanoma naturally (or basal cell carcinoma or mesothelioma). According to this study, the mechanism of action against subcutaneous tumors involved neutrophil / white blood cell accumulation in the skin following administration of topical tea tree essential oil and DMSO. This mixture also induced an accumulation and activation of dendritic cells as well as an accumulation of T cells at the site of application. Tea tree essential oil by itself did not have the same anti-tumor effect as the tea tree oil plus DMSO mixture against cancer. The combination of DMSO and tea tree oil gives tea tree essential oil the ability to penetrate the cancer cells and have direct, cytotoxic effects against them.Note that in this study, the influx of white blood cells, the activation of dendritic cells, and the accumulation of T cells at the treated area may tell us that DMSO and tea tree oil may, in fact, be effective against Staphylococcus aureus infection, but it’s hard to say for sure. The 1981 study that we talked about above did not look at all of the immune system variables that the scientists examined in the more recent skin cancer-cure studies in part because in 1981, a lot less was known about the immune system. One of the reasons why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat is because cancer cells cover themselves with a protective sheath. DMSO is able to penetrate that sheath which is why DMSO is such a good anti-cancer medicine when combined with other anticancer medicines.
Additional scientific studies into the use of tea tree oil and DMSO to cure melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, or mesothelioma later determined that terpinen-4-ol is the specific substance found in tea tree essential oil that inhibits the growth of tumors in a dose and time-dependent manner. In other words, higher doses of the tea tree oil and DMSO have stronger effects against tumor cells. Longer periods of dosing also had stronger effects against cancer in animal models of melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and mesothelioma. But this being said, it’s advisable to start with lower doses of tea tree oil and DMSO and increase the dose slowly to prevent a strong detoxification reaction, especially in patient with cancer.
If you don’t know what a Herxheimer reaction is (also known as a Detoxification Reaction), read more about it here.
Again, we need to point out the fact that the DMSO plus tea tree essential oil caused white blood cells to accumulate after administration. It’s possible that DMSO with tea tree oil penetrates through the sheath covering the tumor, causing cancer cell death that, in turn, weakens the sheat to expose the cancer cell to the immune system.
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Other Ways to Use Tea Tree Oil and DMSO to Treat Skin Conditions
Tea tree oil comes from a native Australian plant that contains terpinen-4-ol, a substance with powerful antimicrobial, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory properties. In scientific studies, tea tree essential oil has been shown to have broad spectrum antimicrobial activity against:- Bacteria
- Fungi
- Viruses
- Protozoa
Tea tree oil can be taken internally in very small doses, but typically, this essential oil is administered to the skin or mucus membranes on the exterior of the body. By itself, tea tree oil has been used successfully to treat the following skin conditions:
- Acne vulgaris
- Seborrheic dermatitis
- Skin cancer
- Melanoma
- Subcutaneous Mesothelioma
- Basal Cell Carcinoma
- More...
- Chronic gingivitis (as a mouthwash)
- Wound healing
When combined with DMSO, tea tree essential oil is an even more powerful treatment for the above listed skin conditions, but there may be exceptions to this rule as we’ve been outlining in this discussion. DMSO can potentiate the activity of tea tree essential oil to enhance the medicinal effects without increasing the dose of essential oil. Both DMSO and tea tree essential oil are non-toxic and they work well together to treat skin and mucus membrane conditions.
Again, note that tea tree essential oil (by itself or with DMSO) should NOT be used to treat diabetic food or gas gangrene / necrotizing fasciitis / flesh-eating bacteria disease. Rather, if you or a loved one is suffering from gangrene, read more here about the use of 3% citric acid to cure necrotizing fasciitis.
Castor Oil, Tea Tree Essential Oil vs. Povidone Iodine and DMSO to Cure Demodex Blepharitis
Below, we talk about a different set of combination treatments that work well as an at-home treatment for demodex folliculitis, a tiny insect that is particularly famous for its ability to afflict the eyelashes to cause itching and the loss of eyelashes. Though anyone who has this problem should definitely consider taking both Lugol’s iodine 2% (20 drops per day) along with supportive nutrients including, especially vitamin B17 because this kind of infestation is particularly problematic in those with weakened immune systems, in this part of the discussion, we’re going to focus on studies into topical treatments for demodex that get rid of itching.Studies have shown that tea tree is one of the essential oils that kill demodex mites, but most often (as we note above), Demodex afflicts the eyelashes. Unfortunately, 100% solutions of tea tree oil are very irritating to the eye. So we know that tea tree oil can safely be used in low concentrations in a carrier oil (that must be safe for human eyes, such as castor oil) to treat the symptoms of Demodex.
Lydi and I also know from scientific studies, our own experience, and from work with others that hexane-free castor oil can be used as an eye-drop treatment for various eye problems. We know that mite-type infestations cause people a lot of agony, so we were interested in finding out if DMSO could increase the penetration of tea tree oil through the hard exoskeleton of the Demodex mite. And we wanted to know if it would be safe to use DMSO with tea tree oil near the eyes. Simply wiping the eyelashes with low-concentration tea tree oil might be safe enough, but while adding DMSO might seem smart, and like a good way to kill even more of those evil mites, it could also combine with tea tree oil to harm the eye.
Dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) can also be administered to the eye by itself, ideally in lower concentrations (at 30% or less). The administration of DMSO to the human eye has been associated with either low or no observable ocular or systemic toxicity, however, patients need to know that DMSO at higher than 30% concentrations can be very irritating to the eye and can worsen both dryness and inflammation, so if you choose to use tea tree oil with DMSO to treat Demodex naturally, be sure to make a proper mix of the proper dose of both DMSO and tea tree oil. In fact, it’s wise to start at a lower concentration (like 10%) initially to see how DMSO affects your eyes because if you use a 30% concentration of DMSO as an eye drop and your eyes become redder and more inflamed, you may not be able to tell whether this medicine is helping you or hurting. Better to start a lower concentration and increase it as soon as you know how it affects your eye physiology.
Tea tree oil for Demodex Blepharitis is usually administered by itself without DMSO at a concentration of 5% to 50% as a wipe to the outside of the eye. Tea tree oil is not administered inside the eye, but rather just to the eyelashes, so that’s important. So we have to note that while castor oil and DMSO can both be administered to the eyes separately, tea tree oil should not be administered as an eyedrop to the eyeball itself. Studies have shown that a once-daily eyelid wipe with a 5% solution of tea tree oil reduces the number of Demodex mites as well as the perceived itchiness of the eyes without causing extreme irritation. So right now, if we were going to look at the information that we know with some certainty this would include:
- The fact that we can administer tea tree essential oil to the eyelashes at a 5-50% concentration with a carrier oil.
- The fact that we should not administer tea tree oil to the eyeball as an eyedrop.
- The fact that we can administer organic, hexane-free castor oil as an eye-drop directly to the eyeball.
- The fact that castor oil can function as a carrier oil for tea tree oil, BUT while castor oil can be administered to the inside of the eye, tea tree oil probably shouldn’t be administered to the eyeball itself as an eyedrop.
- The fact that DMSO can be administered as an eyedrop in lower concentrations of less than 30% (when combined with filtered water).
What Lydi and I did NOT know was whether castor oil and DMSO could be combined into an eyedrop that’s safe for human eyes.
We also do not know whether it would be safe to use DMSO with tea tree oil on the eyelids. We know that DMSO can combine easily with tea tree oil and that DMSO can take substances through human tissues and into human cells, including human eye cells, easily.
So we started researching these questions and found that while the use for DMSO and tea tree oil as a combination treatment had not been studied as a cure for Demodex folliculitis, Povidone-Iodine and DMSO had been studied scientifically. The Povidone-Iodine and DMSO gel combination was administered at a concentration of 0.25% Povidone-Iodine in a DMSO gel of unspecific concentration (but we would speculate that the concentration of DMSO was less than 30% based on other studies of DMSO use in eye treatment). This treatment was used by scientists to cure Demodex blepharitis in a 95 year old woman who probably didn’t care about whether or not her eyelids were a bright orange-red color as a result of treatment. Nonetheless, the DMSO-Povidone-Iodine cure worked very well in this context according to the study.
In the study, scientists noted that tea tree oil is the most common treatment for Demodex blepharitis, but that tea tree oil can be irritating to the eyes and that often, the Demodex mite survives despite daily treatments. Indeed, though scientists have used Povidone-Iodine 10% by itself as an at-home treatment for Demodex blepharitis, the same problem exists. Often, a small population of the Demodex mites survive treatment with 10% Povidone-Iodine by itself. On the other hand, treatment that includes both DMSO gel and very low dose Povidone-Iodine at 0.25% works to get rid of Demodex in a more permanent way.
We found this study, by following a breadcrumb trail through the literature regarding tea tree essential oil for Demodex blepharitis and it highlights an important point about this particular disease. Iodine is toxic to Demodex, but most people throughout the world are deficient in Iodine. Povidone-Iodine is a Big Pharma concoction that combines iodine with a petroleum product that makes the iodine stay on the skin rather than being absorbed. This is useful in surgery or in wound treatment, but because Povidone-Iodine doesn’t soak into the skin and because this substance is toxic due to the petroleum-based ingredient that it contains, it can’t function as a nutrient for our bodies. Rather, for people who have Demodex blepharitis or other types of mite infections, Lugol’s iodine 2% is essential. When our bodies are properly charged with plenty of nutritional iodine, our sweat and sebaceous gland secrete a tiny amount of iodine naturally which helps us fight off mite infestations naturally.
There are no studies combining tea tree oil with DMSO to treat Demodex folliculitis naturally. It does seem probable, however, that this essential oil plus DMSO combination treatment could be valuable as a cure for Demodex, but it could, theoretically, also cause blindness. It’s hard to predict how tea tree oil, even a very small amount, and DMSO might behave in combination if they get into the eyes.
Indeed, though DMSO and castor oil can both safely be administered to the eyes as eye drops separately, but they shouldn’t be combined to treat the eyes. Castor oil and DMSO make an amazing combination when patients use this mixture to treat adhesions or scar tissues, but the eyeballs are very different from human skin and scientific studies simply haven’t been done to confirm that castor oil and DMSO can be safely used into the eyes.
Castor Oil, Tea Tree Oil, and DMSO: Natural Cure for Scabies
Scabies is one of those diseases or rather infestations that causes a huge amount of discomfort and turmoil, but that isn’t a health condition that’s widely acknowledged as a problem throughout the world. Basically, if you have scabies, you probably don’t get out much and it’s not the kind of health problem that you’re allowed to discuss with other people (who will run for the hills if they find out that you have it). Yet right at this moment scabies is afflicting over 130 million people all across the globe. And scabies has become more and more resistant over time to the medicinal agents prescribed by doctors. This is a health situation that tugs at my heart strings because it’s a problem that often afflicts children in orphanages and people who are homeless, as though they really need an additional layer of woe. Once you zoom in on scabies as a health issue and really consider the awfulness of it, it’s hard not to care. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was easy to cure scabies?Scabicides prescribed by doctors are showing an increasing lack of effectiveness, but natural treatments like tea tree oil, on the other hand, are a promising, non-toxic alternative. Doctors have used tea tree essential oil by itself as an adjuvant therapy to treat crusted scabies topically with success, including cases where the patient had drug-resistant scabies.
Humco 232516001 Povidone Iodine 10% Topical Solution, 16oz
Combining tea tree oil with DMSO would likely enhance the acaricidal effects of tea tree oil against scabies. And though there are no scientific studies showing that tea tree essential oil can safely be administered to the eyes with DMSO, we know that the use of tea tree oil and DMSO to treat skin conditions like basal cell carcinoma, mesothelioma, or melanoma has had some compelling results. We know from the scientific studies that DMSO and tea tree oil can cure melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, or mesothelioma through topical application without causing toxic side effects as long as patients follow the recipe that we provide under the section about mesothelioma, basal cell carcinoma, and melanoma. So we can assume that in patients with scabies, DMSO and tea tree oil will also be non-toxic.
However, we still don’t know for sure that DMSO and tea tree oil would get rid of scabies for sure. There aren’t scientific studies demonstrating that this combination specifically would work and as we know from the studies into the use of DMSO for Staphylococcus aureus infections, sometimes DMSO can have paradoxical or unpredictable effects on the body. Nonetheless, there’s some logic here that suggests that DMSO and tea tree oil would work to cure scabies naturally.
But perhaps even more compelling than the DMSO-tea tree oil combination for scabies is the DMSO-Povidone-Iodine combination treatment that doctors used to clear up Demodex blepharitis in the 95 year old woman that we discussed above. Scabies and the Demodex mite share certain things in common, so it’s reasonable to believe that Povidone-Iodine and DMSO could be used to get rid of scabies especially if the patient also takes Lugol’s iodine 2% (20 drops per day / 50 mg taken internally) with supportive nutrients that we’ve listed below:
- Selenium - 200-400 mcg daily
- Magnesium Glycinate- 400-600 mg per day
- Vitamin B2 - 400 mg daily
- Vitamin B3 - 500 mg daily
- Vitamin B-100 complex - follow the dosage instructions on the bottle
- L-Methylfolate / Vitamin B9 - 15 mg per day
- Grapeseed Extract - 400 mg per day
- Zinc / Copper - 15 mg / 2 mg
- Sea Water Supplement - put 1 teaspoon in every 8 ounce glass of water that you drink throughout the day
- Shilajit / Fulvic / Humic Acid - follow dosing instructions
- Switch from regular “iodized” salt to Himalayan Sea Salt
- Vitamin K2 - Take vitamin K2 / MK-7 form at 200 mcg per day.
MAJESTIC PURE Neem Oil for Plants Spray and Essential Oils Mixing , 100% Pure Cold Pressed, Great for Skin / Hair Care, Massage Oil, Nails, Acne & Moisturizer for Dry Skin, 4 Fl Oz
In addition to this treatment with tea tree oil, castor oil, and DMSO, seek out dry sauna treatment at least once daily and take one borax bath each day as well at least 2 hours either before or after the tea tree oil, castor oil, DMSO treatment for scabies. If needed, apply 1 dose of Neem / Azadirachta indica oil once in the middle of the day by itself (without DMSO) at least 1 hour before and after application of the tea tree oil, castor oil, and DMSO. Do NOT combine neem oil with the DMSO mixture. Click here to read about other at home cures for scabies.
Summary
In today’s world, as the healthcare system is crumbling, it’s important that we feel empowered to use the medicines available to use to cure our diseases naturally. But it’s also important that we don’t inadvertently harm ourselves. We can use logic to find cures for disease using information that we know about certain medicines, including both natural medicines and pharmaceuticals. DMSO is a pharmaceutical medicine that’s derived from trees that has a lot of potential in the realm of self-doctoring at home, but there’s learning involved and certain assumptions about DMSO and its behavior in the human body that we have to acknowledge to use DMSO safely. Our goal in writing this discussion was to show readers how Lydian and I use logic to come up with answers and how we use logic to simply note our own blindspots in the data. Sometimes, it’s possible to have blindspots, but still work with DMSO-essential oil combinations to safely treat a particular disease because DMSO and that particular essential oil has been proven to be non-toxic when used to treat a different disease.Our hope is that readers will see that there are important considerations in terms of where DMSO is being used (the eye vs. the skin vs. internally etc.) on the body. Also, we hope that readers will think carefully about the use of DMSO in children whose bodies are different than adult bodies physiologically. And during pregnancy, women need to know that while most essential oils are off-limits, DMSO by itself can be a valuable medicinal tool.
A lot of our clients hesitate to use DMSO because they aren’t willing to learn about it and that’s probably wise because DMSO does take some study to use it safely. But I think that most patients can follow a formula that uses DMSO in combination with other therapies and that this approach can work for people who are self-doctoring at home as long as these patients recognize the limitations of what they know. Not everyone who’s posted DMSO combination recipes online has done their research. Be aware of this before you use this medicine “creatively” to treat disease.
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