Black Salve: A Corrosive Paste Marketed as a Natural Cancer and Mole Cure, With Children Among Its Documented Facial-Injury Cases
Black salve is a corrosive paste, typically built on bloodroot extract or zinc chloride, sold online as a gentle, natural alternative to dermatologic surgery for everything from moles to melanoma. It works by chemically destroying tissue. The FDA has tracked cases of permanent disfigurement, cancer progression, and at least one death. A 2023 FDA-affiliated safety review of "unapproved mole and skin tag removers" found 38 documented injury cases, 14 of them on the face — including a seven-year-old boy whose parent used one to cosmetically remove moles from his face.
What black salve actually does
Black salve — also sold as Cansema, Skinprov, drawing salve, red salve, Black Drawing Ointment, and dozens of other names — is classified as an escharotic: a corrosive agent that destroys living tissue and produces a thick, blackened scab called an eschar. Its active ingredients are typically sanguinarine (derived from bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis) or zinc chloride. Proponents claim it selectively "draws out" cancer while sparing healthy tissue. It does not. Laboratory and clinical evidence shows it destroys healthy and cancerous tissue indiscriminately, and can cause damage after as few as two applications.
⚠️ The FDA: at least one confirmed death
The FDA's current consumer warning states the agency is aware of 24 documented cases of adverse effects from black salve use, 15 of them in the past five years, most involving permanent damage or cancer progression — and one resulting in death when the person used black salve instead of proven cancer treatment. Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration has issued a parallel warning. Despite both, black salve products remain for sale online, including on major retail marketplaces.
What happens when people use it
Medical literature is now thick with individual case reports, and the pattern repeats: a patient with a biopsy-confirmed skin cancer, wanting to avoid surgery, applies black salve at home instead. A 2025 case report described a woman with biopsy-proven melanoma in situ who applied black salve daily for 23 days, believing the resulting ulceration meant the cancer was gone; she required hospitalization for the resulting tissue damage. An earlier, extensively photographed case followed a patient whose melanoma was "treated" with black salve in 2006 — the site appeared to heal, only for the cancer to resurface and metastasize to her lymph nodes, lungs, liver, and other tissue by 2013, seven years after she believed she was cured.
Where children enter the picture
A 2023 FDA-affiliated safety review
A study by FDA safety-surveillance researchers, published in The Journal of Clinical and Aesthetic Dermatology, systematically reviewed reports of skin injury from unapproved topical mole and skin tag removers — products containing concentrated salicylic acid, bloodroot, or other caustic agents, sold openly through online marketplaces including Amazon. The review identified 38 documented cases: burns, ulceration, and permanent scarring, with 14 injuries specifically on the face, four of them close enough to the eye to threaten vision. Among the cases: a seven-year-old boy brought to a dermatology clinic after a parent used an over-the-counter mole and skin tag remover to cosmetically remove two moles from the child's face — a product marketed with no disclosure of the disfigurement risk documented in the medical literature.
The appeal in pediatric cases is different from adult cancer self-treatment: parents aren't typically trying to treat a malignancy, but to cosmetically remove an ordinary childhood mole or skin tag without a doctor's visit, using a product marketed online as gentle and natural. The corrosive chemistry underneath the marketing doesn't distinguish between a benign mole on a child's face and a melanoma on an adult's leg — it destroys tissue either way, and a child's face carries a much higher cost for that mistake than most other body sites.
A criminal record, not just a regulatory one
Black salve marketing under the brand Cansema led to the 2004 arrest and conviction of seller Greg Caton on federal charges related to marketing an unapproved cancer treatment — one of the clearer instances of the FDA and Department of Justice treating black salve sales as fraud rather than merely a safety violation. Despite this, and despite the FDA's warning letters continuing to this day, black salve and salicylic acid/bloodroot mole removers remain readily purchasable online under a rotating set of brand names.
Why this belongs on QuackeryWatch
Black salve follows the same shape as the fenbendazole/Joe Tippens cancer protocol and Colleen Huber's naturopathic oncology: a compelling do-it-yourself alternative to conventional treatment, spread through online testimonials and marketplace listings rather than clinical evidence, with regulators years behind the products' actual reach. What makes this case distinct is how casually it enters households through cosmetic use — not a desperate cancer diagnosis, but an ordinary parent trying to remove an ordinary mole from an ordinary child's face, with no warning label anywhere close to describing what the product will actually do to living skin.