The "soap and solvent" is sodium hydroxide (lye) and DMSO at 120 degC. Those are... fairly... well behaved chemicals, but lye is stout stuff and DMSO attacks nitrile gloves.
You could imagine a remediation process that uses this process but the combo ain't exactly Dawn dish soap. I'd almost prefer pyroprocessing over it.
He also used it on his wife. He told me that she had type I diabetes and neuropathy as a result. Her feet were always cold from poor circulation. That was true until he happened to rub her feet one day after treating a horse. Her feet warmed up in minutes and became normal pink again. After that, he used it on her feet and legs since it improved circulation.
You can say what you will about it being reactive and possibly not good for you but she was able to dance again and get back on her horse so it definitely does have some benefit. They did this for at least 30 years and both of them were past 75 years old when they passed away.
Like another poster said, it is used as a carrier for some medications since it pulls them straight into the bloodstream. I don't think it's magic but I also don't think you'll suffer much using it even with bare hands.
As far as lye is concerned, the sodium hydroxide in this paper, you can easily make that yourself with wood ash and water. It is pretty handy if you are tanning hides since the treatment of a raw hide with lye causes the hair to slip right off leaving a smooth skin ready for the next step.
Btw garlic consumption and subsequent breath is fairly common in many cultures for millennia due to its very positive health effects, just not among snobbish posh ones. There are plenty of solutions to bad odor, easiest being along the line of "if you can't beat them join them" - if you eat even just a bit of raw garlic, nobody smells bad to you anymore.
He had a long career as a wrangler for Hollywood westerns after setting several records himself as a young cowboy in rodeo events as a bronc-buster, calf roper, header/heeler even setting one record in a rodeo at Madison Square Garden. He participated in founding the American Quarter Horse Association. He told me he had trained several actors over the years including a couple from the old TV series Rawhide who had never ridden a horse before that show. He knew Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and worked with them and other western movie stars at one time or another. He knew horses, mules, saddles and tack like the back of his hand and he understood cigars, whiskey, and women intimately as any real man did back then.
My wife uses Penetrex here at home for sore muscles. She claims to get some benefit from it. I was not aware that there were two compounds, DMSO and DMSO2 but we definitely have Penetrex here at home.
It is possible that the product he used back then was DMSO2 if it was widely used in the 60's through 80's in horse liniment. I actually had to look them up to get a feel for the differences between them.
Thanks for asking.
"DMSO can cause contaminants, toxins, and medicines to be absorbed through the skin, which may cause unexpected effects.
"Because DMSO easily penetrates the skin, substances dissolved in DMSO may be quickly absorbed. Glove selection is important when working with DMSO. Butyl rubber, fluoroelastomer, neoprene, or thick (15 mil / 0.4 mm) latex gloves are recommended. Nitrile gloves, which are very commonly used in chemical laboratories, may protect from brief contact but have been found to degrade rapidly with exposure to DMSO."
If we were looking for a chemical to deploy at scale to clean up PFAS in existing environments, we could do much worse.
In this incredibly dilute state, the previous mixture of molecules now spreads out and gets taken up by different tissues. The tissues that take up the compounds depends in the molecular properties of the compound in question, so something like PFAS which are highly lipophilic (iirc) meaning fat soluble, they will be taken up by cells pretty readily as they can easily cross the lipid bilayer membrane but will be stored in adipose tissue and continue impacting those cells and possibly be slowly released over time to impact the organism systemically. This of course will depend on initial dose concentration, duration of exposure, adioposity of the organism, along with a multitude of other factors.
The study of how compounds circulate in this way is a subfield of pharmacology known as Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME)
Was thought for a while to have anti-inflammatory effects itself.
Ethanol works as an absorption enhancer too.
I once had a long-running (weeks) experiment that used DMSO as a solvent. Early on it was realized that the DMSO was degrading all non-glass rubbers and plastics in the chemical "circuit", which began to sag like an old TinkerToy structure. Had to rebuild/rerun with parts that were resistant to DMSO.
Unrelatedly, microwave assisted reactions in DMSO solvent wete found to have some totally gross failure modes that were a pain to clean up and got banned in the lab
Aka - won't kill you outright if you are just properly careful.
We're talking about fluorine chemistry here, so things get kind of extreme.
DMSO is used in pain relief in other countries (eg Mexico). It's also excellent for burns as it allows the body to repair a tiny amount of nerve damage or prevents it. Hard to say. This is demonstrable by burning yourself, I guess. My family and I have used it for burns for over 20 years. Granted, we don't get burned/encounter people who have been burned at home that often. I had a close friend with a rare disease (McCune Albright's Syndrome) who used it for pain relief, after I treated a burn she received.
It has been reported that it use has repaired massive nerve damage, which is probably coincidental. It is sold in healthfood stores in the US, but you want to dilute it 1/100 parts water. While it is primarily used as an industrial lubricant, on contact, it immediately travels through the skin to the nervous system. Most people get the strange reaction of the taste of oysters, when it's absorbed. There is a small percentage of people with various allergic reactions, like with many chemicals.
I would never mix it with soap, for any reason. It's like mixing shoe polish or granola with soap, you just end up with a mess of concerns.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19380203/
it was an expensive prescription med a few years back. I get dyspepsia from NSAIDs so I thought, "Could I make an ointment like that with ibuprofen?" and looked in the literature and found that ibuprofen is absorbed quickly with DMSO even more so than diclofenac. So I made a batch, but when I tried it I found I'd get dyspepsia very quickly after applying it to my skin so I guess the ibuprofen was being absorbed efficiently.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/fire-offshore-pemex-...
C3 photosynthetic plant life will end in about 600My.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the...
At ppt concentrations in seawater, it doesn't seem worth it. PFOS remediation is for contaminated soil or industrial wastewater.
"...The relatively high freezing point of DMSO, 18.5 °C (65.3 °F), means that at, or just below, room temperature it is a solid."
, per Wikipedia.
I guess, it could be powdered before use. Though the whole application proposition hardly fits into a common household let alone kitchen.