The Sacred Geometry of Ivermectin

A review of miracles that a wonder-drug CANNOT accomplish

Claims that ivermectin is a cure-all are circulating like herpes at a kissing booth amongst Americans who never made it past high school biology -thanks to miraculous proclamations by celebrities, pundits, and most disturbingly… state legislators.

What started as a cure for covid that doesn’t cure covid, has transmogrified into claims that ivermectin cures cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, lyme disease, and even aging itself! Incredible!

This is what we in the medical field call bullshit when we aren’t in the exam room with you. Professionalism demands it. I am a doctor, but I’m not your doctor, so I can be far more colorful in sharing my honest take on liberties taken with the evidence that are Epstein-esque in their abusiveness.

Is ivermectin, the Nobel-Prize-winning anti-parasitic a wonder-drug or snake oil?

The short answer is: yes. The long answer is far more interesting.

Ivermectin was invented shortly after the 1974 discovery of a natural compound called avermectin, produced by a specific bacterium (Streptomyces avermitilis) found only in Japanese soil near -of all places, a golf course. It was supremely toxic to a wide range of worms and insects at doses that were mostly harmless to mammals. Don’t tell the natural-healing crowd this, but selective hydrogenation of avermectin’s C22-C23 double bond (see below) created a less toxic, more stable molecule that was ideally suited for formulation into a pharmaceutical, and this vastly-improved product was dubbed ivermectin.

Ivermectin has enhanced lives and benefitted the welfare of billions of people throughout the world. Originally introduced as a veterinary drug in 1980, it committed genocide on a wide range of internal and external parasites in livestock and pets. This is where it (unfairly) earned the recent colloquialism “horse de-wormer.” I mean… it does de-worm horses, but the nickname detracts from ivermectin’s vast accomplishments in the mitigation of human suffering.

Dramatic effectiveness in animals catalyzed commercial availability for humans in 1987. Ivermectin cured some absolutely ghastly human parasites, like onchocerciasis (river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) pictured below.

Ivermectin also cured the non-tropical things that can natively seep into the nooks and crannies of suburban soccer-moms who tend to be less concerned with 3rd-world infections. Things like intestinal roundworms, lice, scabies, and a very long list of other super-disgusting worm and arthropod infestations that many would gladly slather themselves in napalm to eliminate in the absence of a wonder drug like ivermectin.

So when the three discoverers of ivermectin (William Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura, and Youyou Tu) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015 for their magnificent work on the ground and in the lab, the medical community collectively nodded in approval and reverently asked:

“Why did it take 40 fucking years to acknowledge this astounding health triumph?”

Wait, that’s… fantastic! How can you call this snake oil??

I’m not.. at least, not in the context of treating diseases that ivermectin has the capacity to cure.

Something doesn’t have to be intrinsically useless to be snake oil. It can be anything -even miraculous in doing something else well. Snake oil is like sarcasm: context matters. When someone sells you highly-effective oven-cleaner, you should not use it to clean your face based on its oven-cleaning-prowess. It isn’t designed for that, and it might melt your face off. Keep your mind open, but don’t let it fall out of your calvarium.

Such has been the case since the pandemic. In April of 2020, at the beginning of the US experience of the covid pandemic, a paper was published showing that SARS-cov-2-infected monkey cells in a Petri dish, experienced a “5000-fold reduction in viral RNA at 48 hours” after bathing it in ivermectin.

Before I drag this as smarter scientists did before me… it was a welcome investigation: we should always be vigilant of repurposing established drugs to fight disease whenever possible. It’s economical, and we already possess superior info on the safety and toxicity of old drugs compared to new ones. In silico drug screening specifically identified ivermectin as a potential treatment on the promising mechanistic grounds as a viral replication inhibitor.

Well worth looking into, but the same study predicted its own failure, as the effective concentration to exterminate SARS-cov-2 in a Petri dish was 100 times higher than the maximum safe plasma concentration of ivermectin in humans (toxicity is predictable at about 10 times the normal dose in most people, and lower in those with certain genes).

In Petri dishes, you can kill covid with hydrochloride acid or explosives, but it is super hard to safely do that on people. Glass is fragile, but life… even more so.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure

To be clear, ivermectin was never effective in treating covid, even when it looked promising on paper. A few small studies early on generated interest and hope, but every large study with greater statistical power that followed did not. Many of the initial studies that did show benefit were withdrawn from publication or retracted afterwards for significant methodological errors or plain old fraud.

Many hospitals (including mine) treated sick covid patients with ivermectin out of desperation in the absence of conclusive evidence. Sounds bad in retrospect, but when the only thing that’s keeping your hospital from running out of beds is a steady stream of fatalities -it gets to you. Doing something feels better than doing nothing when there is unrelenting suffering and death.

But study after study after study showed that ivermectin didn’t do shit for covid. It still was still the same beloved low-toxicity antiparasitic that kept worms from eating out eyes more aggressively than an enthusiastic yet anatomically-confused lover, so no one died from taking it at appropriate doses. BUT, as covid vaccines became widely known to be effective at mitigating death and disability, people WERE dying of covid because they didn’t want to be vaccinated under the false pretense that ivermectin was just as good or better.

Who could blame them, when every night Tucker Carlson told our parents it was miraculous? It was only miraculous in how effectively it culled the naive along partisan lines, so I do blame Carlson and all of the other idiots who cosplayed as medical authorities. Forgoing real treatment for bogus cures will kill you, no matter how much you believe in the drug or the cause it supports.

Even a handful of ideologically-compromised physicians lost their board certifications for failing to renounce their political belief in a medical concept that had been disproven. A physician has every right to try novel treatments in the context of proper consent, but they do not have the right to practice medicine that is known to be harmful. These physicians were never sued for malpractice because their patients very much wanted ivermectin. But a happy patient is not necessarily well-cared for: physicians who liberally prescribe opioids for recreational use are also almost never sued by their patients. Evidence-based medicine is not a popularity contest.

Scientific inquiry clearly demonstrates no benefit to taking ivermectin for covid, but once a belief becomes grafted to one’s sense of identity and belonging, the affected have no qualms about casting off the verifiable truth of scientific evidence as leftist or woke or a deep-state conspiracy. Even a tiny minority of doctors and scientists are mesmerized by tribally-reinforced delusion, and they are deified by their followers. Robert Malone is one of the top publishers on Substack, and it is likely his largest single source of income.

If reason doesn’t determine what ivermectin is good for, the sky is the limit.

In 2026, you can find influencers pushing narratives on ivermectin that are far more expansive than a cure for covid. To them, ivermectin cures so many completely unrelated ailments, I had to make a chart to represent it:

I included a proposed mechanism to explain why ivermectin is believed that it might cure a particular disease, because there is always a kernel of truth behind the most persistent narratives of idiotic disinformation. Let’s look at the evidence.

On viruses:

Fun fact about ivermectin: it’s centrally neurotoxic, and the blood-brain barrier actively keeps it out of the central nervous system. An overdose overwhelms this mechanism, leading to brain damage. The antiviral activity of ivermectin is only seen at concentrations far beyond the threshold at which one might slow-cook their brain in a bubbling broth of continuous seizures.

Framing ivermectin as an antiviral agent resides squarely on the in vitro phenomenon of suppressing viral replication via inhibition of the importin α/β1 nuclear import pathway. The indisputable counterargument remains that this is only seen at drug concentrations that are hard to reach in a human, and deadly if you manage to pull it off.

There is an extra layer of stupidity here. None of the viruses in that list are phylogenetically related -they are simply familiar to most people. Ivermectin doesn’t work against any virus, let alone all of them. In fact, there are precious few broad-spectrum antivirals at all. While their development is considered essential for pandemic preparedness (particularly where virus-specific drugs are unavailable) the field of broad spectrum antivirals is still in its infancy, with most antivirals acting only within a very narrow-spectrum.

The most compelling and recent data imply that this unattainably high concentration of ivermectin isn’t just antiviral in nature, it’s generally toxic to all living things. In a sense, that is a broad-spectrum agent if you include yourself in the list of killable organisms.

On cancer:

The use of ivermectin in the treatment of cancer has trended on social media and the truth isn’t as simple as saying that all of its underlying principles are entirely false -although posts and celebrity endorsements are misleading to the point of being harmfully false.

Here’s the problem. There is a ton of evidence that ivermectin is an effective antineoplastic agent in vitro and in vivo across a wide range of cancers. And yet… there is no evidence that humans should take ivermectin is a substitute for any other established antineoplastic course of therapy.

How do we reconcile these incompatible statements?

Surely if something cures cancer in Petri dishes and mice, it would work in humans, right? Unfortunately, no. This is not a conspiracy to suppress the truth, it’s a long-established effort to conduct intellectually honest, clinically meaningful research that demonstrates how hard it can be to translate basic science research into clinical therapies.

Ivermectin has shown promise in preclinical studies, meaning it has not been demonstrated to be effective in living human beings -let alone better than established oncologic treatment of any kind of cancer. One study shows that ivermectin isn’t even soluble at in vitro concentrations needed to kill cancer.

In tissue cultures and in lab critters, ivermectin has demonstrated mechanistic relationships with cancer cells across multiple oncogenic signaling pathways, including Wnt/β-catenin, PI3K/Akt/mTOR, and STAT3. These interactions can lead to cell death and inhibition of tumor cell proliferation across a wide range of malignancies. In the lab (but not in people), ivermectin:

• impedes and destroys lung adenocarcinoma.

• enhances the efficacy of doxorubicin in osteosarcoma models -but not by itself.

• can inhibit tumor growth in breast cancer.

• reduces drug resistance to other chemo agents

Super exciting, and well worth further investigation, but evidence suggesting effectiveness in treating cancer in humans is nearly non-existent.

There has only been one small clinical trial performed in humans:

Nine women with grim, triple-negative breast cancer were given ivermectin along with a more proven agent balstilimab. 6 patients saw their cancer get worse. 1 patient got better, 1 didn’t get worse, and 1 dropped out due to complications from cancer. Researchers pointed out that these patients already had a miserable prognosis, and no one became ill from the ivermectin. There was insufficient power to say that the one person who got better did so because of the ivermectin (because it could have been the balstilimab or random chance).

Mice and Petri dishes are not the same as your mom and dad. This is one of many reasons why you shouldn’t decide to take ivermectin in lieu of seeking proven treatment for cancer. Even the women in this study continued to take established treatment.

There is a vast chasm between preclinical promise and human-effective cures that is neither new nor unique to ivermectin. The literature is packed with examples of promising agents that show impressive anticancer effects in cell culture that cannot and will not translate to clinical use. Their utility is confounded by:

• non-physiological concentration requirements (most essential oils, lemon peel, coriander, tomato, and banana).

• concentrations required to kill cancer are toxic to humans (green tea).

• lack of selectivity between killing cancer and normal cells (broccoli, brussel sprouts, and other vegetables).

• poor oral bioavailability (curcumin, experimental peptides).

• rapid metabolism (Resveratrol).

• paradoxical dose responses where low doses may actually promote instead of kill cancer (curcumin, resveratrol, and other common nutraceutical compounds), and

• in vivo drug precipitation -generally speaking, when liquid drugs solidify inside of you, its bad! (Celecoxib, and polyphenols like quercetin, EGCG, curcumin, and resveratrol).

Take this as a cautionary tale about over-interpreting preclinical data. Rigorous analysis of practical context is essential. Disinformation isn’t always a lie; sometimes it is a gross exaggeration of fact.

On neurodegenerative disease:

This is the dumbest one of all.

Guess where ivermectin needs to be in order to “treat” brain disease like Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, or any other brain disorder? The very place that defines its toxicity.

RFK Jr. couldn’t even treat his parasitic brain worm with ivermectin, because effective brain concentrations kill brains as readily as worms. Albendazole treats a wormy brain. And to be perfectly clear: albendazole does not cure neurological diseases that are unrelated to parasites taking up residence in your warm, gray thinking-organ.

To date, ivermectin has only been proposed for study on Alzheimer’s. Zero publications exist on the direct investigation of ivermectin on Alzheimer’s targets. Do not speculatively take neurotoxic drugs for neurological disorders -that’s a bet that even Polymarket won’t cover.

For Parkinson’s, there is an interesting study demonstrating that ivermectin has a novel mechanism for improving the striatal release of dopamine -giving a glimmer of hope to sufferers. Bear in mind that this work was done on transgenic mice that were decapitated and had their brain cut into thin slices prior to being exposed to any ivermectin.

This is a sound methodology for examining a very specific interaction, but we all can agree that an intact and still-living Michael J Fox has little in common with a paper-thin slice of dead mouse brain floating in broth.

When studying an intact and living rat brain instead of rat brain carpaccio, ivermectin actually causes brain inflammation -specifically in the hippocampus, which like many parts of your brain you can’t do without if you want to do things like remember your own name or find your way home from your own front yard.

If anything comes of this research, it will be a piecemeal deconstruction of ivermectin, carving out the smallest moiety of beneficial activity and excluding the toxicity -if that is possible. Such isolation is essential to the safe use of a specific interaction tethered in the complex hazards of reality. The resultant ivermectin-derived molecule will likely be unrecognizable next to its parent.

On being an anti-inflammatory:

Get ready for more overhyped promises on extremely limited evidence, confounded by identical issues.

Nearly all evidence for ivermectin’s anti-inflammatory mechanisms comes from animal models and in vitro studies. These demonstrate that ivermectin can modulate multiple routes of inflammation, including GABA receptor modulation and direct effects on T-cell activation and proliferation. These studies have demonstrated anti-inflammatory effects in models of asthma, colitis, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis -at concentrations that are orders of magnitude higher than what is safely achievable in humans.

Ivermectin only has FDA approval for one inflammatory condition: rosacea. Acne for old people. In making humans that are old and red look… still old, but not as red -topical ivermectin excels. In this context, it has safely demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties beyond its anti-parasitic effects. The strongest clinical evidence for anti-inflammatory activity in humans is only skin deep.

Heart disease, chronic Lyme, diabetes, and asthma are not pathologically similar to rosacea -or to each other. While they all involve inflammation to varying degrees and etiologies, ivermectin is already known to be a poor systemic anti-inflammatory agent at non-toxic doses, no matter what you hear from influencers.

On cardiovascular disease

All evidence is severely limited and impressively conflicting. While one study showed potential benefit in acute myocarditis in mice through anti-inflammatory mechanisms, another demonstrated detrimental effects like arrhythmias and gross anatomical pathology in rats having heart attacks. A 2025 review noted that contradictory preclinical findings provide no basis for clinical use.

On diabetes

No clinical evidence exists for ivermectin in diabetes treatment. Only a single in vitro study showed that ivermectin inhibited adipogenesis in 3T3-L1 preadipocytes by reducing triglyceride accumulation, but this cell culture finding has not been reproduced in animal models, and does not support any clinical application.

For perspective, I could find over 10 published papers that specifically investigate the fact that IV dexamethasone causes violent burning and itchiness around your butthole shortly after administration, which spontaneously resolves and has no clinical relevance beyond giving people a heads up about their bottom.

There is over 10 times the literature on a clinically insignificant butthole phenomenon than there is to support ivermectin as a diabetes drug.

On turning back the hands of time:

This one is the funniest. One study has found that ivermectin extended lifespan by ~8%… in rotifers. That’s it for anti-aging evidence.

These are microscopic aquatic organisms that acquire about 10% of their active genes from bacteria, fungi, and plants. Humans can’t do that. Humans have more genes in common with starfish and sea cucumbers than rotifers, so…

This finding has zero relevance to human aging.

And it’s a good thing that rotifers don’t cause human disease, because taking ivermectin for it would extend the life of the causative agent. Big yikes.

Translating studies to combat aging from Petri dishes to human trials frequently leads to results that fall far short of initial expectations. Want a longer life? Work out. Get vaccinated. Don’t speed. Don’t be as obnoxious as I am most of the time (there are still a lot of deaths attributable to homicide). Maybe take a statin when you get older. Unlike ivermectin, there is tremendous high-quality evidence that any of these extend human life.

Ivermectin-madness is not confined to your crunchy aunt

This is more than a laughable fad. Celebrities and wannabe celebrity influencers are not the entire problem. Increasingly, it is state representatives who want to codify trendy idiocy into the law of your land.

As of today, 27 states have tried, and 5 states have enacted -some form of legislation to make ivermectin available without a prescription.

12 states still have bills pending a final decision amongst a gathering of confident ignorance that many call: state legislatures. Because if a majority of any gathering of real estate agents and small business owners agree that a prescription drug that is known not to treat cancer, treats cancer -it should be made available without a prescription for citizens to ineffectively treat their cancer. Totally sane, right?

See the comprehensive list attached to the bottom of this article to see if your state has successfully drafted imaginary cures into their fantasy-medicine league. Some highlights:

• 100% of ivermectin-freedom bills were authored by Republicans, even in states that vote majority-Democrat.

• 100% of the bills that passed were in Republican-majority states.

• 0 state medical boards supported this legislation in their respective states, and most officially opposed it, including in deep red states like Texas and Utah.

• 26 of the 27 states had already passed specific laws limiting public-health authority in emergencies, demonstrating a deep pre-existing distrust of medical and scientific expertise.

Snake oil was traditionally peddled by traveling salesmen, individuals who collected their cash and disappeared into the horizon with their ill-gotten gains. This is different. This is a rise of American Lysenkoism, whereby a political party identifies some scientific facts as true to their ideology, and others as hostile to it. The hostile facts are passionately demonized, and imaginary explanations are crafted to fill the void left by arbitrarily discarded facts.

Like the snake-oil salesmen of old, some people make money (namely, the purveyors of false cures, and the legitimate medical establishment that treats predictable, expensive, and avoidable damage) -but lawmakers don’t financially benefit directly. Politicians are motivated to do this for bigger reasons:

• Identity signaling: A simple, easy to understand test of belonging. “Good conservatives take ivermectin for cancer -just ask Mel Gibson.” You won’t die of cancer right away (cancer is slow poison) so your poor choices won’t affect your ability to vote, and your passion will all but assure a party-line vote.

• Simplicity for low-information voters: Complex tradeoffs are collapsed into binary slogans, which are easier to campaign on and remember. Politicians who tell you ivermectin does things it doesn’t are either idiots, or worse -convinced that you are an idiot.

• Populist framing against expertise: Casting expertise as untrustworthy implies that politicians are an authentic advocate of the people they are setting up for failure. Lawmakers reframe disputes over evidence as “power struggles” instead of facts pushing back against fabrications. This further entrenches supporters who see politics as loyalty to a brand or sports team. Fans of the Cleveland Browns will always stick with them despite decades of dismal performance.

Laws are shared rules to coordinate lowest-standard behavior, resolve disputes, and to allocate rights among participants in society. When lawmakers come to believe that laws define reality -rationality erodes, and those same participants suffer greatly from nature’s uncompromising indifference to their dreams.

OK bro, don’t forget your 14th covid booster

To those who say this is a political post, I would strongly disagree. This highlights the damaging effects of politics on medicine. The difference is both subtle and profound. Polarization has driven Americans to divide everything in the world up into right and left, without ever pausing to consider that many of these things are right or wrong:

If clean water is leftist, will the right drink contaminated water?

If domestic manufacturing is right-wing, will the left reject supply-chain resilience?

My question to the public is:

When political identity demands disbelief in consequences, why do so many people choose affiliation over outcomes -especially when it’s their health outcomes?

Many things do not align anywhere on a partisan spectrum. Medicine is one of them. Facts matter, but a scientifically illiterate population that has been trained to ignore expertise won’t appreciate that until after:

1. they have served the purposes of those who exploit them, and

2. it’s too late to reverse course on the illness that they treated incorrectly.

Belief in politicized medicine is tragically costly. Medical interventions are not divisible into right or left. They simply have highly-specific, non-overlapping indications, benefits, and risks. Ignore this at your peril.

Better yet, call your representative and demand that lawmakers be held accountable for practicing medicine without a license. But don’t hold your breath. You’ll die, and ivermectin won’t bring you back.