From Sharper Night Vision to Curing Lifelong Blindness — How DMSO Heals Each Level of Vision Loss

Dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) is a simple compound with a remarkable blend of therapeutic properties. Over the last year, I’ve compiled thousands of studies showing how it treats a wide range of conditions including:

Because of how effective DMSO was for a wide range of “incurable” conditions, after being discovered in the 1960s, DMSO quickly became the most demanded drug in the country — at which point the FDA did everything they could to suppress it.

The FDA succeeded, and DMSO’s incredible utility became largely forgotten. However, due to its remarkable efficacy and the extensive evidence corroborating its medical utility, once I brought attention to DMSO (in a post-COVID world where widespread skepticism exists towards the medical establishment), it rapidly went viral, and there is now a similar interest in DMSO to what was seen in the 1960s.

Because of this, I have now received over 5,000 reports from readers who’ve benefitted from DMSO (which I compiled here),¹ most of which match the effects typically attributed to DMSO (e.g., rapid healing from an injury or eliminating debilitating chronic pain). However, I also come across some that are quite extraordinary, such as this 75 year old man who regained sight in his eye after being blind since birth after using DMSO to eliminate a chronic sinus infection.

Murray’s story illustrates one of the least appreciated facets of DMSO — it is exceptionally well suited to treating a wide range of eye conditions — many of which are considered incurable within conventional medicine.

Note: The German DMSO community (including DMSO utilizing ophthalmologists) has also reported that DMSO has an extraordinary affinity for treating a wide range of eye conditions.

DMSO and the Eyes

DMSO’s uses for the eyes originally emerged after participants in early clinical trials noted that their vision frequently improved when an unrelated issue was being treated (as DMSO will concentrate within the eyes) — something many readers have also reported to me. As DMSO has a variety of different therapeutic effects, such as healing tissues, reducing inflammation, eliminating infection, removing protein deposits, or increasing blood circulation and fluid drainage, it is well suited to treating a variety of eye conditions.

As such, numerous studies and hundreds of readers have reported remarkable improvements in the following eye conditions:

Note: The extremely high success rate readers have reported for treating floaters is quite noteworthy given the lack of satisfactory conventional treatments for the condition.

In turn, since many of the above conditions can impair vision (along with many more minor ones not mentioned), it is not surprising that many readers have reported visual improvements from DMSO^{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31} (e.g., many reported improved night vision^{32,33,34,35,36}). Reports include:

“I just dabbed a bit of DMSO on my eyelids and got an immediate improvement. I could see my pool shots so much better.”³⁷

“Vision has improved, and I can read some small text again — The deterioration of vision that I felt at night after a few hours on the screen has lessened.”³⁸

“DMSO immediately helped my eyesight by improving contrast after I just put a little above my ankle.”³⁹

Furthermore, DMSO’s therapeutic properties enable it to reach the retina and optic nerve, thereby directly treating many challenging visual disorders that ophthalmology still struggles to address (e.g., beyond lowering eye pressure, DMSO can directly counteract the degenerative process of glaucoma).

Note: DMSO has also been repeatedly shown to enhance the penetration of drugs into the eyes, allowing lower (safer) doses to be used and to potentially eliminate the need for eye medications to be injected.^{40,41,42,43,44}

Eye Protection

One of DMSO’s most well documented properties is its ability to protect tissues throughout the body from a variety of otherwise lethal stressors, such as heat, cold, radiation, poisons, and a loss of blood flow — which is a key reason why it produces such remarkable results for strokes and other central nervous system injuries.

In turn, many readers have reported remarkable stroke recoveries with DMSO (along with a dog who’d developed a variety of vestibular neurological issues such as uncontrolled eye movements, due to mini strokes which immediately resolved from small amounts of DMSO and magnesium).⁴⁵

Note: Multiple readers have also reported DMSO rapidly resolving the visual disturbances occurring with migraines.^46,47

As the eyes are also nervous tissue, similar effects from DMSO have been repeatedly observed within them:

Finally, in parallel with DMSO’s ability to heal damaged eye tissue, numerous studies have shown that normal doses of DMSO have no toxicity to the retina or optic nerve.

Retinal Diseases

DMSO’s restorative properties make it uniquely suited to treat challenging degenerative eye diseases.

“My son has retinitis pigmentosa. He uses DMSO eyedrops. They help his [eye’s] field of vision.”^58,59

For example, retinitis pigmentosa (RP),⁶⁰ is a genetic disorder that causes gradually increasing visual loss, and is incurable (excluding a rare subset that an $850,000 gene therapy treats about half the time).⁶¹ As such, it immediately caught a few doctors’ attention that their RP patients had their vision improve while receiving DMSO for something else.⁶²

This prompted a preliminary (successful) investigation that found that DMSO applied to the eyes improves RP,⁶³ and then a larger trial of 50 patients with RP or macular degeneration.⁶⁴

There, no retinal toxicity was observed, and 22 (44%) had improved visual acuity, 9 (19%) had improved visual fields, 5 (10%) had improved night vision and 48 (96%) had no further worsening of their vision (which would otherwise be expected in these retinal disorders) — results which are quite extraordinary. This, for example, was one patient in that study:

“When his DMSO treatment was started, this patient could see hand motion only with his right eye, and had a visual acuity of 20/200 (Snellen) in his left eye. Five days later, his vision was measured as 20/70 + 1 in the left eye, and he could count fingers at 5 ft with his right eye. Three months later, his visual acuity was 20/50 in the left eye.

This patient has continued his treatments daily, except for a 1-week trial interval without DMSO. He noted that his vision began to get worse during this interval, and when he restarted treatment, his vision returned to the level he had just before discontinuance. His most recent visual acuity measurement (two years after starting DMSO) is still 20/50 in the left eye, and he can count fingers at 6 ft with his right eye.”

Animal studies have also shown that DMSO prevents retinal vision loss:

In parallel, readers have reported a variety of significant visual improvements from DMSO in a variety of eye disorders (e.g., vision loss due to RP, glaucoma, or multiple sclerosis), including many instances where “incurable” macular degeneration (AMD) improved^{70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81,82} (or stopped progressing^83,84,85):

“I personally have used eye drops for 6-7 years. It has effectively stopped my macular degeneration.”⁸⁶

“Personally I have used dmso eye drops for three years. My retina doc said my scarring is down 50% with my AMD.”⁸⁷

“I use DMSO eye drops for my macular degeneration, and it brought my sight from 25/40 to 20/25.”⁸⁸

“I [have AMD] and have been using 40% DMSO for three weeks. Before, I was having ink-blot-like hallucinations that severely affected my central vision, to the point where I couldn’t drive at night even with my glasses on. Just three weeks later, I can now drive at night in the rain without wearing glasses at all, and the impairment in my central vision is completely gone.”⁸⁹

“I tested my AMD with an Amsler’s chart earlier this year and my left eye showed distorted lines. After a month of DMSO, I had no more distortions.”⁹⁰

“My husband has macular degeneration and he is using DMSO. It’s been about four months and his vision has not gotten worse, I think it’s improving. He’s driving better.”⁹¹

“I now use the drops for my macular degeneration. Have great results.”⁹²

Note: Most of the reports I’ve seen on macular degeneration were improvements of the more common (dry) form. Some evidence also suggests it can help wet macular degeneration by inhibiting VEGF and the formation of new blood vessels, which underlie many eye diseases.^93,94,95,96

Additionally, DMSO has also been reported to heal a variety of other challenging retinal conditions. For example, readers have reported improvement of a macular hole,⁹⁷ a severe macular pucker that had required urgent surgery,⁹⁸ and a torn retina that had previously healed badly.⁹⁹

Reversing Blindness

DMSO’s ability to treat conditions like macular degeneration also allows it sometimes to produce even more remarkable results. For example, when I initially received Murray’s seemingly impossible report that DMSO restored sight in an eye which has been blind for 75 years, I was inclined to believe it as I’d read very similar accounts within the early DMSO literature, such as:¹⁰⁰

Conclusion

I’ve spent decades seeking out methods to treat macular degeneration, and seen a few approaches (e.g., intensive nutritional regimens, eye circulation improving regimens or energetic inputs that reawaken dormant retinal cells) “do the impossible” and bring lost sight back to the eyes.

It’s hence quite noteworthy that DMSO is both able to create many of these same therapeutic effects (e.g., by increasing microcirculation to the eyes, it greatly increases the vital nutrition retinal cells receive), and like those therapies, restore vision, but do so in a much more broad and economical way (rather than only targeting one component of vision loss).

“I’ve had countless patients who were already doing all the ‘right’ things with nutrition and weren’t getting better with their pain/autoimmune problems, and then they did well after adding DMSO.” — James Miller MD

More importantly, the fact that DMSO can quickly and easily treat “incurable” conditions like vision loss provide a critical lesson into the myriad of other chronic illnesses we are facing, as the eyes are not the only part of the body affected by the ever increasing circulatory impairments (many of which result from vaccination) and nutritional depletion of the food supply seen throughout society.

The significant health challenges our society faces require doing something different. Fortunately, as things like DMSO’s saga show, the solutions we are searching for already exist.

More importantly, we have reached a unique historical crossroad, as the dire need to fix America’s disastrous healthcare has thrust us into a never-before-seen political climate where large parts of the culture, media, and government support rather than oppose the adoption of these real and affordable pathways to health. It is up to each of us to make the best of this moment and rediscover the forgotten umbrella therapies.

Author’s Note: This is an abridged version of a longer article that discusses the evidence presented here in more detail along with how DMSO can be used in conjunction with natural therapies to treat the conditions discussed in this article (e.g., macular degeneration) along with a variety of other eye disorders (e.g., floaters, cataracts, glaucoma, nearsightedness, dry eyes, and chronic eye strain). That article, along with additional links and references, can be read here.

A Note from Dr. Mercola About the Author

A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician from the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate AMD’s exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and am grateful to share it. I also respect AMD’s desire to remain anonymous since AMD is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.

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