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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty. All industrial processes wind up with nasty, and this may be swapping a less tractable and nastier problem for a well understood DMSO handling problem.

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DMSO is a solvent that is is absorbed directly through the skin. Jello Biafra was wrong though, if you mix it with lemon juice and pour it on your hand, you will not sense the taste of lemons in your mouth. You will taste garlic. Try it and see.

https://genius.com/Dead-kennedys-dmso-lyrics

I’m not sure what happens when you mix it with LSD. Again, try it and see.

When I worked for Bill Atkinson's sister, Dr. Kathy Atkinson, at UCR in high school, I was involved in a DMSO leak. Dr. A. was a microbiologist, but botanists worked upstairs. I guess DMSO is used a lot in botany, and they let an experiment boil over and DMSO got into the HVAC air return and then into the whole building. Smelled like garlic, and I turned bright pink. We had to evacuate. I also tasted garlic for a day or so. Nowadays you have to be 18 to get a job in a UC Lab.

You could get DMSO and ketamine at the vet supply store back then in the 80s. I heard of people ingesting acid via DMSO in that time frame, but it could have been an urban legend. It was a horse area and DMSO was used with horses to get stuff deep into their legs or something like that.

Back when diclofenac + dmso was rx-only and crazy expensive I tried making my own formulation with ibuprofen and dmso for back pain hoping it wouldn’t tweak out my stomach. According to what I read, ibuprofen would be very well absorbed with dmso.

After applying the ointment I got an upset stomach in minutes so yeah…. It was well absorbed.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3141840/

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21230-diclofenac...

> Uses DMSO (by-product of paper production processes) as solvent. It's pretty nasty.

Copying my comment on another subthread [0] here:

I've only ever personally used DMSO in chemistry labs, but Wikipedia [1] makes it look pretty safe: it claims that it has a higher LD50 than ethanol and that it's been FDA approved for human usage, so I wouldn't call it nasty. Now, I wouldn't really want to drink it because the side effects and taste sound pretty unpleasant, but it appears that it would be safe to do so.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46442253

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfoxide#Toxicity

A solvent which is tractable for complex waste reduction, and skin absorbed and would presumably carry those contaminants into the body.

But yea, I overrated it's nastiness.

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