Neuroscientist Reveals if Methylene Blue is Worth the Hype (RFK, Rogan Using it) - Dr. Sherr

Most of the products out there are overdosing people. I mean, not like I don't think it's going to be like an overdose like you need to go to the hospital kind of thing, but it's more overdose in the sense of you have to go low and slow under most circumstances, unless Dr. Scott Sher, you are one of the world's leading experts on methylene blue, at least in my opinion. You've talked about this stuff for for a decade, uh, and now we're at a point where RFK is talking about it, Rogan's talking about it—like methylene blue is is trending hard—and there's a lot of information, misinformation, and it's it's wild out there. So I wanted to get straight to the source.

So first and foremost, what is methylene blue like at the very core level? I put a link down below for 30% off through Thrive Market. You know what I like about Thrive Market, and I'm going to be very real with you, is that just because something is allowed on a grocery store shelf or something is allowed in a food product because it's generally recognized as safe doesn't mean that it's good for us. Just because there haven't been studies that show that it really harms people doesn't mean that there isn't evidence that it might not be really good for us. And most of us, 99% of us, don't have the ability to go into a grocery store and know how something really affects our body, right? The thing I like about Thrive Market is that the foods that are on their shelves, digitally speaking, are good quality foods, and they have people that put their best foot forward to really find good quality food that's sustainable, that doesn't have hidden nasty ingredients, and is now accessible and a lot of times more affordable than most grocery stores. So that's what I respect about them. Whether you want snack foods, whether you want something that's more wholesome, whether you want something that you want to use in a meal or spices or a treat, they have it all. So that link is for 30% off your entire first grocery order and a free $60 gift; it gets delivered right to your doorstep. The quality of the food is awesome, and they're out there for a really truly good cause, which is why I'm a fan of them and why I've supported them for all these years. So that link is down below.

Sure. So well, thanks for having me back, Thomas. It's good to see you again. Um, it's it's been 5 years since the company uh started making products for with methylene blue in them, and so we it's been a fun journey for me clinically to see how impactful they have been and how much they're doing for so many people. But it is an interesting story; it's a fun story and kind of a crazy one at the same time. So methylene blue started off as a textile dye, and it was developed as—it's it's actually fully synthetic, and that's important for people to realize—it's a fully synthetic dye that was developed in in the 1870s, and it used to dye blue jeans blue. So if you had blue jeans in the 1870s and they were blue, they were likely dyed with methylene blue. So it is a synthetic chemical, and at the time, you know what they were really trying to figure out was how they could treat infections, actually. Um, the this class of dye called a thiazine dye, they figured out actually treated malaria, and it got this name of being called actually a Magic Bullet at the time—a Magic Bullet they called it that because you could give very high doses of methylene blue and it would kill pathogens, but at the same time it wouldn't harm the human host. And in 1897, it became the first drug registered with the FDA. And so yes, let's get it out of the way: it's a synthetic compound. And does that mean that everything that's synthetic is bad for us? No. Does that mean everything that's natural is also good for us? The answer is no. Like when I was in medical school, I saw people die of liver failure because they were foraging for the wrong mushrooms. And so we know that not everything natural is good for good for us, and then we live in a synthetic world. And so now, especially because of all of our synthetic inputs at all the time, we need things that may not be from nature to help us, and methylene blue is one of those things. And so at its base, it is a synthetic compound that is blue, very very blue.

And so between 19 1897 and around 1950s, it beca—it was really an antimicrobial at the time; that was its main function. And back through World War II, pilots and other people in the Pacific Theater had to take methylene blue prophylactically to prevent infections overall. And so they all these songs about uh the the beneficial yet uh surprising side effect of having blue urine. So what I what do I mean by beneficial is that because methylene blue concentrated in the urine, it was actually used for urinary tract infections at that time. And so but after the 1950s or so, antibiotics came around and antimicrobials overall, like penicillin and things like that, and so it became less interesting or less exciting for people to have blue urine overall. And so from there, methylene blue has a different story entirely. Then it becomes the first drug that was used as an anti-psychotic actually because it has a capacity called monoamine oxidase inhibition. From there, it became a laboratory uh molecule where they use it to actually stain parts of the cell, specifically the mitochondria. And from there, it became understood that it was having this amazing effect on hemoglobin and oxygen-carrying capacity as well as in the mitochondria itself. And over the last several decades especially, there's been a lot more interest outside of the medical mainstream because, you know, this has been around for a long time now—a lot of interest in how it can compensate for mitochondrial dysfunction, which as you know is rampant in this country and around the world.

First thing that comes to mind I think people might have concern with though, I want to like get out there. Yeah, okay. If it's making your urine blue, is it making your bladder blue? Is it making like what, you know, it's a dye; is it going to dye organs? And I know there's been some concern about that, so I want to get that out on the front. Yeah, let's get that out of the way. So there was a there's a recent paper that's been uh that's been floating around the the internet and socials and things about blue brains and things like that. And so methylene blue is used as a rescue agent for severe septic shock, for multi-organ failure, and for pulseless electric activity—so PEA arrest, basically. And so at those circumstances, you can use extremely high doses of methylene blue IV, very very as a kind of a last-ditch effort to help these people. And in those circumstances, they there's this paper that's being floating around that the the brain was blue after administration, and that's not surprising given how high of a dose they were giving. This is 2-3 milligrams per kilogram; this is huge amounts of methylene blue compared to what we use clinically, which is like 4, 8, 16, 25 milligrams in total instead of something three milligrams per kilogram, which would be like 210 milligrams IV, which is a huge amount. And they did autopsies on these people about 3 to 5 hours to 25 to 24 hours after uh the actual administration of the IV. And so these low doses—no, they do not have this effect. They do concentrate in the mitochondria, so they do temporarily increase the bless of your mitochondria for sure, as the mitochondria are being processing or processing the methylene blue and using it in various ways. Methylene blue is always in this cycle; it always goes from being blue to being colorless depending on its state; that's called its redox state. And so when you're urinating blue, you're urinating out all the blue; you're not getting any remaining blue in the system. The blue is not something that's staining your bladder; it's not staining your brain; it's not staining any other organ. You don't have to worry. Very, very low doses are very safe, and that and this is a well-established molecule or compound that's been around for over 100 years, as we talked about, and we know how safety the safety profile of it, and we know it's fantastic. And so it's a great—was fantastic clickbait out there for everybody to take a look at. But if you read the paper, it's absolutely ridiculous that you'd even think that these lower doses of methylene blue would have any problem at all. But you know, at the same time, I I do get that people see the shock value of seeing a blue brain and and get worried about that. But if you're getting—if you have severe septic shock and you're just about to die, then it's probably worth having, you know, 3 milligrams per kilogram of IV methylene blue, you know, in case you can survive. And so I actually did see this in medical school; it's a last-ditch effort kind of thing because these very, very high doses of methylene blue, instead of becoming redox cyclers, which means it cycles electrons—which we can talk about—it becomes a pro-oxidant, specifically only at these very high doses, and that it causes a significant amount of vascular constriction, and that is supposedly—we're trying to help people with severe vaso-dilation related to shock.

So so with the uh before we get into kind of the electron transport chain and how it works in the redox state and all that, is like I've noticed sometimes when I take methylene blue, sometimes at the same dose my urine will be really blue, sometimes it won't. Does that—is that an indicator of what your body's using or is it just a hydration thing? So it could be both. We—it certainly could be a hydration thing; the less hydrated you are, the more blue your urine is likely going to be. Um, if you've had B vitamins or something else that's going to make your urine yellow, then it might be a neon green, for example, which could be surprising. So just, you know, surprise. Um, and so that could be part of it. The other piece, and we're still trying to work this out, Thomas, because in the beginning I felt that people under more of an oxidative load, more stress, more inflammation, they required more methylene blue uh to be present and then to be converted—so meaning—meaning that so there's two different states; this is the redox states of methylene. You have an oxidized form and a reduced form. When methylene blue is oxidized, it can pick up free electrons, just like an antioxidant would. When it's reduced, it can donate electrons, just like uh NAD or FAD, which are the electron donators to our electron transport chain and our mitochondria. And so what happens is when it's oxidized, it's the blue color that you see when you take it; that is oxidized, okay? And then you have the reduced form when it gets more electrons um that that uh that bind to it; that is when it becomes called leuco methylene blue or basically colorless methylene blue. So the idea in my mind was, well, if you have more oxidative load, you're going to have to reduce more methylene blue to be able to combat, you know, that oxidative load, right? And so as a result of that, you'd have colorless urine, so you would need more methylene blue to get the blue urine overall. But we've—what we've noticed is that it also depends on the route of administration, for example. So if you swallow methylene blue, it seems to be that is actually the case, but if you dissolve it in your mouth, like as a troche, for example, in here, then it doesn't actually work the same way, and I think it's because it works faster up here, so you don't have as much capacity in the sense that um because it works so fast, it's going to go in the—faster is what it comes down to. So but that's not a bad thing because it's going to be working faster up here as well if you need it. But in general, what I've seen from people and anecdotally for me, I need more when I travel; I need more when I'm stressed to find that I have blue urine, but that doesn't seem to be across the board though; there there's some variability there.

Yeah, I mean, that's generally been kind of my my protocols, like the more the more stressed I am, the more increased dose or things like that, and I and then I try to, you know, if I'm everything's copesthetic and everything's cool, then I'll, you know, take a couple days off or whatever, you know, just totally. Yeah. What uh you mentioned it's a, you know, works along the electron transport chain, and that can be a very complex thing for people to wrap their head around. It's a—you said it's an electron donor and an electron carrier, which is really interesting. Yeah, what does that really mean in human terms? So in human terms, we eat, especially our fats and our carbohydrates, so that we can make electrons or take electrons from our food and then shuttle those electrons into our mitochondria, which are our energy-producing factories. Most people know that the energy-producing factory—the mitochondria—they've heard that before, like the batteries of our cell, the powerhouse of our cell. And so in essence, we're eating those particular types of food, um, and proteins are kind of like our last ditch if we need them as well, but fats and carbohydrates, they go into something called the citric acid cycle or the Krebs cycle in our mitochondria, and the Krebs cycle has all these various steps along the way that allow us to take electrons from our food, and they take electrons and they carry them on NAD and FAD, so NADH and FADH. And everybody starts NAD; everybody's excited about NAD, NAD, NAD, right? That's all I hear these days. But NADH and FADH, what they do is once they picked up electrons from our food on these these intermediate cycles that I learned in medical school but just memorized and forgot about, but now I know them a lot more from a clinical perspective—what happens is that these electrons go into the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. So the electron transport chain is a four-protein complex chain of proteins that allows these electrons to flow through it, and as these electrons are flowing through it—protein complex 1, 2, 3, and 4—complex 4 is called cytochrome oxidase; a lot of people know that or some people do. As these electrons are flowing through, you're creating what's called a proton gradient; you're creating a gradient between the uh the outer membrane of the mitochondria and the inner membrane. So the mitochondria has a double membrane; it's got like a fully external one and it's got and so then it has and then and then it has an internal one as well. So you have spaces between those membranes, okay? And so what you're doing there is you're creating what's called a proton gradient. As the electrons are flowing through, it's creating enough energy to to push things—push protons or H+ across a membrane against resistance, basically. And then as what happens at the end of that is that electrons flow through, and their final stop is complex 4 where they get picked up by oxygen. Oxygen's our final electron acceptor at complex 4, and then those protons come through ATP synthase, which which is our motor, our rotor that creates ATP in our cells. And so complex 1, 2, 3, and 4—complex 5 technically is ATP synthase; that's our actual rotor. Like RPM-wise, it's like 6,000 RPM; it's a really, really fast and very, very strong motor. And I just learned this a little while ago: you're making about like 150-160 pounds of ATP every single day, and this is not something that stays around for very long; we're utilizing it all the time, but it's a huge amount of ATP. And the places that make the most obviously are going to be our brain, our heart, our liver, our musculoskeletal tissue, and then our gonads—our eggs and our sperm, actually. Sperm and eggs have the most mitochondria per cell out of any cell, and then our brain has the second most out of there after that. And then um there's only one cell in our body that does not have mitochondria; do you know what that is? No. It's the red blood cell. So the red blood cells used to have mitochondria, but they got rid of their mitochondria so they could carry more oxygen. So that's just a fun fact over there. But the problem, as you know, is that 94% of the US population has some element of mitochondrial dysfunction, meaning that they don't have the ability to either make the energy well, because the other part of it that I didn't talk about is when you make energy, not only do you make ATP, you also make what are called, you know, quote-unquote waste products of energy metabolism—carbon dioxide—not really a waste product; this has been hammered into me over the years now; it's actually a signaling molecule and very, very important—water, and what are called reactive oxygen species. So these are free radicals; this is oxidative stress; people have heard of these words before. We make some of this because it's a feedback loop to have a better sense of what's happening in our mitochondria in real time. So our mitochondria is always giving—has tons of feedback loops, tons of understanding of how much energy to make, how much energy not to make, should it rev it up, should it decrease it, should it release something like nitric oxide to get more uh substrate, like more more glucose or more fat to the area to make more energy. And so what's happening here is that you have this reactive oxygen species uh that can build build up, and you need to have antioxidants in the body to be able to compensate for the reactive reactive oxygen species that you make. And so the problem is that metabolic dysfunction—the inability to do any of this, either make energy from your food or detox from the energy that you make—causes dysfunction. And so 94% of the US population is dealing with something and some element of this, and this is why methylene blue can be so powerful because it works on both sides; it works on the the side to help you make energy, and it helps you on the detox side too.

Dang, I mean, that's—is it something where you found people uh—I mean, how how quickly can it rescue that metabolic function? Almost immediately in people. I mean, that's the crazy thing about it. When I when I first learned about methylene blue a while ago and we started using it, I just kept getting these calls from patients or from friends, and they would just be telling me, "I felt—I've been feeling terrible for months, years, and then I took methylene blue, and then five days later my joint pain was gone, my my blood pressure was better, uh my my brain was turned back on," and initially I was like, "That's not possible; it can't be that happening that quickly." But as I went through the research and the literature, what happens with so many people is that they have blockages in those complexes; they have block blockages in complex one and complex two especially. Uh, complex one is actually one of the main ones that's destroyed or dysfunctional when you get an infection; it doesn't go away, or like you have mold uh you have mold exposure or you have severe stress or medications—even a fun and very popular medication called metformin actually has a destructive destructive capacity to complex one. So I take issue with metformin for this reason, um, and I think if you're going to take it, you probably need to cycle it, and and if you exercise a lot, you you probably don't need it; that's just my two cents on metformin. But anyway, it's destroying complex one. And so what methylene blue does, it can compensate for any of the destruction that's happening in any of these complexes and either reboot them; it can recycle NAD, for example. So if you have a complex one that's not working very well, ideally what's supposed to happen is that NADH is supposed to donate electrons and become NAD after it goes to complex one, but if your complex one's not working very well, then you're not going to be able to donate those electrons, right? So then the whole system gets stuck. So what methylene blue can do is it can take those electrons from NADH, recycle it back to NAD+, so it can go back to the citric acid cycle, pick up more electrons, and then what methylene blue can do with those electrons is they can donate it to further down the chain, further down the chain, so to complex 3 or complex 4. And that's why it's so powerful is that it's doing this sort of compensatory mechanism, and at the same time, there's evidence that it can help regeneration with some of the complexes—complexes, especially complex 4 in mitochondria, which is another one that's often damaged because of infection, stress. I didn't talk about what what why why do people have mitochondrial dysfunction? Infections, stress, medications, toxins in our environment—anything from the food that we eat to the stuff we're putting on our skin—and of course, number one is going to be insulin resistance. So if you're insulin resistant, your whole mitochondria do not like to play, and because they just have too much substrate, they have too much glucose, and they're trying to downregulate their their their efficiency so that they don't have to make as much energy because it's too energy dense, right? And so all these things are happening; the mitochondria aren't working well, and you bring in methylene blue; it reboots your mitochondria; it compensates for for complex dysfunction. And on the other side of it—all that oxidative stress, all that reactive oxygen species—low doses of methylene blue can directly act like an antioxidant because they can pick up those free electrons; that's what reactive oxygen species are; they're they're unpaired electrons—either oxygen with a with only one electron instead of two, sometimes three, but usually just one—hydroxy radicals, hydrogen peroxide; these are all oxidative molecules that can build up in the system. We need these, but the problem is so many—are antioxidant deficient, so we don't have enough vitamin D, we don't have enough melatonin, which is really important in our mitochondria, alpha-lipoic acid, vitamin C, and others that are there to help compensate for that oxidative load—glutathione, of course, as well.

So do you become dependent on it then, or does it have a like a rescue effect that can sort of take effect even after the met or the uh methylene blue is is no longer being used? I mean, essentially, if you're sort of restarting that cycle, or initially you're kind of having to use that methylene blue to sort of kickstart everything, get things going, but could you come off of it and restore some of that function? That's exactly what I like to try to do, right? The way I always think about this is as a clinician; I'm working with patients to try to help them right now while they're on the longer path to optimizing their health. The beautiful thing about methylene blue is you can bring it into the system very, very early—even people that are really sick, you know, chronic, complex medical illness—yes, you can use it for them, also for endurance athletes and things which we've spoken about before, but you can bring it in early, and you can start seeing the benefits very quickly. Their energy is better, their detox capacities they're better, their brain fog, their inflammation, etc., all getting better. But the key always is methylene blue is a great compound that will help regenerate the mitochondria to some degree, but it's not going to work as well as stop eating McDonald's and drinking alcohol every night, you know, stop being so stressed all the time, maybe don't sleep next to a partner that's snoring and keeping you up all night, you know, get a sleep divorce, whatever it might be, like work on—so I always I always always couch at this; I always, you know, caution my patients, I'm like, "Look, methylene blue is going to be fantastic; we're going to see some amazing benefits very quickly once once we find the right dose, and and titration is important; we can talk about all that, but it doesn't take the place of doing the things that we need to do on a daily basis to keep these human avatars, these meat suits, working in these environments that we have—like we have lighting, we have—we're going to be on airplanes; we're going to be more stressed. Methylene blue is always going to be helpful in those cases, I think, because all of us have more stress on top of our regular stress regularly." So so for me, like when I travel, I'm going to take more methylene blue; am I going to take it all the time when I'm home? No. If I'm—if I'm doing the things—if I'm being optimized, if I'm sleeping well, I—I—what I do is I I check mitochondrial function over time, like you can check various aspects of your mitochondria over time and see how well you're doing. And then for me, what I've seen at least in my patients as well is like once you get methylene blue on board, once you titrate and find the right dose, you're rebooting, you're regenerating the mitochondria using the methylene blue, and then you're supporting it with optimizing your your vitamins, your minerals, your nutrients, your diet, your lifestyle, your stress, your behavior, everything there, and then you could peel it off over time, and your dose, as you mentioned, also can get lower and lower and lower. So often times when I'm starting people, it's a ramp-up of dose; we get to a dose, and then over time, once we get them relatively well optimized, then we start ramping it down because you need less over time because your mitochondria are more optimized.

Interesting. What about uh this is a a little tangential for a second, but you know, I know my wife has experienced that during um PMS; she increases her dose, she feels better during that. Is there any evidence there, or is that just like, "Hey, there's this more stress load coming on at that time?" Well, I think there's two things there. I think there's certainly more stress, and and there's more oxidative stress as a result of that, so there's going to be more inflammatory burden overall as the body is trying to now get rid of lining that it doesn't need, right? As a result of there a huge inflammatory load that happens to create the shedding of—everybody loves that word, shedding—word; it's like moist—people hate that word—o—that's my brother's least favorite word is moist. Sorry, I said it. How many times did I say it? Sorry, I say—say shedding one more time. Just kidding. All right, I did. Um, but as it's shedding off—and what other word do you say? Anyway, that's like the medical word we use. But um that's causing an inflammatory stress, and so methylene is going to help with that inflammatory stress, mitochondrial stress that's happening. The other piece of this, which is interesting, and we can go there if you want now or later, is there is a mood-boosting effect to methylene blue. Not only is it enhancing mitochondrial function and compensating for these complex dysfunctions as we talked about and also helping with the detox side of things, and in addition to that, it's—what I would say there is—I'm going to talk about being a monoamine oxidase inhibitor in a minute, but because it does increase mood and boost that, there is a—what I would call with methylene blue is if you start off in a low enough dose and you increase the dose slowly over time, it's like I call it more like an adaptogen overall, and adaptogen in the sense that do you need more detox capacity? There you go. Do you need more energy-enhancing capacity? That's what it's going to do first, and then it'll do that and compensate for what you need first as you ramp up the dosing overall. So so as you potentially ramp up dosing, it might expand the scope and what it can do exactly. Yeah. So but it seems to do what it's required of you first; if you need more antioxidant capacity first, it's going to work there. That makes sense. If you need more energy enhancement because your complexes aren't working very well. And so people should know like what—what do you mean not working very well, right? This is symptomatically—what are you going to feel? Uh, you're going to feel brain fog, you know, concentration problems; you're going to have fatigue and memory problems; you might have liver detox issues, or you might have issues with exercise-induced fatigue. So you work out, but then you feel so fatigued in your muscles; you can't move for maybe a couple hours. And maybe some of my patients…

A couple days really, these are all signs of mitochondrial stress overall and mitochondrial dysfunction. And infertility is a big one too. I mean, infertility rates are going up, you know, dramatically. And and the end process, there's a lot of reasons why, but is is the mitochondrial dysfunction overall. But to your wife, since I'm talking about the eggs again, is when there's the other piece of methylene blue that's important, and that's it's that it also works as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. And I I mentioned that earlier when we were talking about antipsychotics. And so the first anticho actually designed or developed was actually derived from methylene blue. And interestingly enough, it was called chlorpromazine, and we don't use it anymore, thank God, but um because this has a lot of other issues that are not related to methylene blue at all. Um, but the the thing about the psychiatric medications is that back in the 1940s and 50s when they were developing them, what they would do is they compounded the new psychiatric medications with the methylene blue, which means that they they put them together in the same compound, in the same uh pill. And they did that because they wanted to make sure that the psychiatric patients were taking their psychiatric medications because if they did, their urine would be blue, for example. So, but interestingly enough, you know, now methylene blue has this new life, actually. As we now understand, as a monoamine oxidase inhibitor on its own, and the benefits uh that are result of that, which we can get into if you like.

Yeah, what is uh what is an MAOI? Yeah, so monoamine oxidase inhibitor is something that prevents the breakdown of certain neurotransmitters in the brain. It prevents the breakdown of norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. And so some of the older drugs, the very old drugs, antidepressants were MAOIs. Um, but they were very bad because they were what called irreversible MAOIs, and they would cause it to cause you have lots of side effects, or things like cheese and wine and chocolate and things like that, and they had other medication side effects. So those medications have like kind of went out of favor, and then they have your SSRIs and your SNRIs, and which are the serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. Now there's much more interest in the GABAergic neurotransmitter system and causing and being attributed and having a significant correlation to depression, anxiety, insomnia, and things like that. We know that depression is not a serotonin deficiency, side note, but in any respect, MAOIs were developed initially for that reason, and then they came out of favor because of those side effects. But the thing about methylene blue is that it's a very short-acting MAOI and a very mild one overall, especially at lower doses. And but it could be very helpful. It's actually been studied, these at low doses at like 16 milligrams for depression and bipolar disorder. And part of that, of course, is the mood-boosting aspect of having more norepinephrine and dopamine and serotonin around. But we also know from a lot of mental health disorders have significant amount of mitochondrial dysfunction as well, so working on the mitochondrial aspects is huge. Um, and that's, you know, what actually got us interested in methylene blue is that these very low doses were having this profound effect on mood, on mitochondrial function, on on endurance, and we were just very surprised as we were doing a lot of the initial research into it. We saw a lot of research that was happening in models of Alzheimer's as well. There's a researcher down at University of Texas Austin named Francisco Gonzalez Lima, and he did a cool study where he compare he actually in animals he did methylene blue low dose with near-infrared light and saw how methylene blue and near-infrared light both could donate electrons directly to complex 4 in the mitochondria. So so actually it was electrons with methylene blue, it was photonic uh energy to complex 4 by near-infrared light enhancing ATP production, interesting. And so his idea was that Alzheimer's was a blood flow issue, right? And so there's actually some interesting studies using methylene blue as a clearance for some of these amyloid proteins as well, interestingly enough, although the amyloid hypothesis is kind of dead right now, but but amyloid itself is still a problem we think. Um, and it's well I think we think it's a problem because it's there because of another reason, not because it's there itself, right? There's amyloid builds up because of inflammation, infection, and things sort of like high blood sugar being a problem with insulin resistance, but not high blood sugar isn't the initial cause exactly, it's there and that's indicative of something else going on, exactly. And that's what the is at this point. So there's been some studies now looking at Alzheimer's and methylene blue, for example, with some pretty profound benefits at very low doses. And this is actually really interesting study because they did they had three arms of the study: one was given 8 milligrams twice daily of methylene blue, one was given 75 milligrams twice daily, and one was given 150 milligrams twice daily of methylene blue. So we haven't talked about dosing a lot, which we can do, but what happens is as you get to like higher doses of methylene blue, not only are you increasing the the redox capacity, but you're also making the system react with its own antioxidant capacity as well. And the reason for that is that higher doses of methylene blue, over about a milligram per kilogram, which is about 150 pounds in a human, um is going to increase the amount of hydrogen peroxide that you make in the system. And people get scared about hydrogen peroxide. We make hydrogen peroxide all the time in our cells, and this is really one of our main antimicrobial stimuli in the system is to make hydrogen peroxide. So our immune cells make hydrogen peroxide, our lysosomes make peroxide, which is part of our cell that that kills bugs as an antimicrobial. And so at these higher doses, about about a milligram per kilogram, which is about 70 kilograms or about 150 pounds, that's when you start getting this antimicrobial effect of methylene blue, usually especially for acute stuff, and you get more hydrogen peroxide production, which is the cause of the antimicrobial effect. Okay, so but that also at the same time, because you're making more hydrogen peroxide, that stimulates a pathway in in our body called the Nrf2 pathway. NRF2 pathway is our pathway that gets upregulated when we need to make more glutathione because glutathione's our master antioxidant. And so the problem is that how many people are glutathione deficient? A lot. How many people with Alzheimer's and a brain that's already significantly stressed are going to be glutathione deficient? The answer is probably the majority, but you know they don't test for this, right? And so this study, they did 8 milligrams twice a day, 75 and 150 twice a day. 8 milligrams twice a day was the placebo group, in quotes. The 8 milligrams twice a day did significantly better in the study from a memory focus retention, every cognitive score that they did compared to the 75 and the 150. And this is in my estimation because they were given too much methylene blue without understanding their redox and their antioxidant status, and and that's a big deal. And and that's why, you know, we very and I'm very from a clinical perspective very adamant that most of the products out there are overdosing people. I mean, not like I don't think it's going to be like an overdose like you need to go to the hospital kind of thing, but it's more overdose in the sense of you have to go low and slow under most circumstances, unless it's an acute indication like an acute stress, acute trauma, acute infection from an antimicrobial perspective. There's good studies on using methylene blue in animals for traumatic brain injury, for stroke. And so I have all my patients have higher-strength methylene blue in their medicine cabinet just in case. But my go-to for the most part is going to be a lower dose from a mitochondrial perspective and from a mood-boosting perspective too.

Yeah, so with uh pivot over to performance for just a minute because I think these kind of performance isn't just for an athlete. Performance is uh I mean there's a practical application for performance, but then there's like a reason why it's helping you perform, which is probably applicable to a regular person that's not an athlete as well. Y so is it just giving you more energy during a workout, or there is there an oxygenation aspect? How is it kind of helping performance because we're seeing this particularly in the endurance world, but now I'm starting to see it come out a little bit more in the CrossFit setting, in the kind of uh, you know, more anaerobic world too? Yeah, we talked about it last time, but in brief, I work with ultramarathoners that do 100-milers, and he was doing one in Leadville, which is the biggest and the I think the tallest 100-miler in the world, these ultramarathons, and he cut off three hours of his time uh working with me and just using methylene blue while he was running. He also used glutamine, which we talked about in another video I know as well, but and that didn't give so he didn't have as much diarrhea, which is good news, but it was my estimation it was the methylene blue that really helped him because it was helping his aerobic capacity. And aerobic capacity, what I mean by that and most of your listeners I I likely know this is that maintain the ability to allow yourself to continue to use your mitochondria to make energy for longer. Okay, and so your mitochondria are require oxygen, right? And so that's why we call it aerobic capacity. Methylene blue what it can do, we talked about compensating for all these protein complex dysfunctions, what it can also do is it can donate electrons, excuse me, it can accept electrons just like oxygen in your mitochondria, which means that it can be the final electron acceptor just like oxygen. So if you don't have as much oxygen around or you're losing it or you have less of it because you've been doing 100 miles or not even that, like less than that from an perspective, you'll see that what methylene blue can do is compensate for that lack of oxygen around, and you give yourself more aerobic capacity as a result of that. And I have a couple of my patients, this happened a while ago when I first started using methylene blue just as kind of a trial to see with mitochondrial function etc. I was talking to one of my patients like and she's like, well, I refuse to not have it on board when I'm working out in the morning and doing my cardio. And I asked her why. She's like, well, I can keep my heart rate up longer for like another 10 or 15 minutes more than I would be able to if I didn't have the methylene around. And this is this kind of piqued my interest significantly. I'm like, well, if this is happening, that means your aerobic capacity is is elevated. And this makes a whole lot of sense because how methylene blue is working. And so you know, you know, I live in Colorado, which is at 5,000 feet, and so or anybody that's listening, if you're on an airplane, you're pressurized to 8,000 feet above sea level, so that the airplane is is lighter than, you know, being at sea level. And 8,000 feet above sea level, you have about 14 to 16% oxygen in the air that you're breathing, and so that's not a lot of oxygen. And that's one of the reasons why people feel when they travel is that their oxygen is low and their cells go into like holy [ __ ] mode like where's the oxygen, and they get more inflammation and more oxidative stress. And then you get shitty air on an airplane, or you get the shitty food. Hopefully you don't eat the food on airplane anymore. Nobody does it anymore, I hope, right? Um, and then and you also get the people that are around you, you know, that are sick or whatever. And so methylene protecting you because it's allowing you more aerobic capacity, and it's also, you know, antimicrobial and and it's also anti-clotting, has all these other benefits. Now, of course, you come to Colorado, we have beautiful air, you know, usually, so you don't have to worry about the air, but you are at 5,000 feet, so everybody that comes to my house that comes to visit gets methylene blue. And we're actually now testing it, I have a couple um high-level endurance athletes that do high peaks in Colorado, so we're going to be testing methylene blue and some of these athletes um and it's going to be a lot of fun to see how it goes. But I I very anecdotally so far it's been a game changer for many of them. So if you're going to altitude, I would always take methylene blue with you.

So from an anaerobic perspective, is it probably just helping anaerobic performance because it's increasing your ability to recover at a higher heart rate in the periods of time that you're coming out of anaerobic? There you go, that's exactly it. So like from an anaerobic, I use it after um because it's a great recovery tool as you allow the hormetic stress of the anaerobic activity to do its thing, then after that or or even as that's happening at the end of it, that's when you want to bring in methylene blue. And it's a really good point you made, because I I get this question all the time, especially if you're thinking about pairing methylene blue with other types of modalities. If you're thinking about red light, obviously I told I just mentioned that's it's a good synergy there. Like I get a lot of questions about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, for example, and I get a question, well, should you use methylene blue before hyperbaric or should you use it after, for example? And I often say, well, what are you using it for? And and do you need more mitochondrial support or is it more that you want the hormetic stress of of the hyperbaric chamber at deeper pressures? And then because going cause a huge amount of oxidative load just like anaerobic activity would, and then you use methylene blue as a recovery tool. And so I use it both ways, um but in in in essence, pre-endurance work and post-anaerobic work. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting because if you look at sort of the the entire reason for building your aerobic capacity for most athletes that are not endurance athletes is the ability to be able to I've always kind of looked at like this: if you're running on flat ground and then all of a sudden you run on an incline, yeah, you know, suddenly you're you're going anaerobic, and then when you reach the top of that hill, then you're waiting for your aerobic system to come back and take over, right? So you're, you know, you win anaerobic, how quickly can you get back to aerobic, right? That's like I've always joked with that's that's kind of my definition of fitness is how quickly can you get back to aerobic after anaerobic. And you know the idea of training zone 2 is training yourself so that you've built base so your base is higher so you're recovering, you're capable of recovering at 120 beats per minute rather than having to wait until you're down to 70 or 80, right? So it would make sense that even potentially for anaerobic activity taking methylene blue potentially could help you recover between anaerobic sets faster if it's allowing you to recover at a higher heart rate, so you could decrease your rest time between sets, or I say sets, but even like CrossFit's a great example, doing something like a high-wattage 20-calorie Echo Bike or a row, and then you're going to go into a deadlift after that. If you can decrease the amount of time that you need to recover between those two modalities, yeah, that's the difference between winning and losing. I love that you just gave me a really interesting idea with the sense of like if you it may be that you can do more, and I've thought about this on the hyperbaric side before, like you can do more anaerobic work for longer, basically. Let me rephrase: it's going to take you more work to get anaerobic if you have methylene blue on board, maybe, right? And as a result of that, if you're able to do more anaerobic work because of that, you know, because you had to get you had to work harder to get there, like are be able to build more as a result of that, and then can you recover more on the other end of it because you have the methylene blue on board to help with that that recovery period between sets? That's a cool idea. I didn't think about that. It's the same concept of someone that is fat-adapted. Yeah, they change their they stay aerobic for a longer period of time. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily change their peak performance, but it changes how long they're well it can and I'll get to that in a second, but doesn't necessarily acutely change their peak performance, but it would change if someone was fat-adapted, for example, because their metabolism is just more efficient, then they're able to stay aerobic to let's just hypothetically say 85% of max heart rate, so they're only having this 15% little delta that they have to be anaerobic, right? Uh, which would mean that you can go longer because you're only tapping into that carbohydrate store for 15% of the time versus say hypothetically 20% of the time or 25% of the time. So that means you could do more sets before you'd actually be at complete exhaustion. You could go longer. Yeah, that's that's really interesting. I mean, there's another colleague that I that you know as well, Brian McKenzie, that does a lot of work with hypoxic training, and he does a lot of CO2 retention, and he's been doing a lot of work with he and I have been chatting about hypoxic training then doing endurance work with methylene blue on board, and this makes a lot of sense, right? You're becoming more hypoxic, you're creating a stress in the system that says I need more oxygen, and then you have methylene blue on board, and he's seen his V02 max go up five to 10 points when he checks it, I mean, in short order, right? And for longer endurance work. So I think there's there's something here, right? In this sense of the between-set recovery, the additional anaerobic work, the long-distance aerobic work, the endurance work, and you this is all being worked out now because there haven't really been a lot of studies on this, and that's that is a big thing because, you know, methylene blue has been around such a long time, nobody wants to do anything with it because it doesn't have like from a from a pharmaceutical perspective because there's no patent at the end of the rainbow for them to get, you know, a blockbuster drug that kind of thing. But I think that's the beauty of it. We have this capacity now to use this and and really modulate it, and we're seeing it, I'm seeing in clinical practice all the time across this whole spectrum from people that are super super super sick to people that are really healthy and just trying to optimize, and on the endurance side too.

Yeah, an important question that people have brought up, and I know Dr. Paul Saladino mentioned this in a video, do you turn down I think I always look at things from an enabling perspective anyway, so it's a good question. I think about like, okay, like a good example is like you don't want to typically take a high amount of vitamin C or antioxidants post-workout, right? Because you want to enable the body to be able to produce its own, you know, SOD and everything that it needs to be able to do the job. So if you're taking things like methylene blue over time, do you downregulate your body's own capacity from an antioxidant perspective, but also from an ATP perspective? Like are you making it so that hey, I'm providing this additional source of energy in a way? Yeah, once I remove it, does that downregulate, and do I feel sluggish, and do I decrease ATP? I mean, the first thing to say here about Paul's video was that 94% as I mentioned of the US population has an element or significant amount, there's a spectrum of mitochondrial dysfunction. So there's very few people out there that have purely amazingly optimized mitochondria and that don't I think benefit from methylene blue on at least an ad hoc intermittent basis. Okay, and these are all going to be under more stress, we're all going to be under bad lighting, airplanes, and those kinds of things. Like to say to to take that out of the way for a minute and say I think that most of us can benefit from using methylene blue at very low doses, tight training to find our right dose, our right dose um intermittently at the very least. But you ask a really good question, which is when you stop methylene blue, does it have this rebound effect at all? Do you have this effect where your antioxidant depleted because you had methylene blue on board and then you didn't replete your antioxidants enough ahead of time, and then you take it away? So the answer is that if you're optimizing over time, you will need less methylene blue, and you will feel that over time too. You will feel that you need less to get the same same benefit because you optimize everything else in your life, and you'll know when you need more because you'll be like, oh, I'm more stressed, I'm I have have stuff going on in my life, my kids' soccer games are making me scream, I told you about that, you know, those kinds of things and stress me out. I don't get stressed out by many things, but my my daughter's soccer games somehow I do still. Um, but anyway, so you'll find over time this sort of reverse tolerance thing for many people, which means that you need less and less overtime. Um, and what I found is that if you're optimizing the the system, your your vitamins, your minerals, your nutrients, your co-factors, your behavior, your your lifestyle, like you're not going to need as much, and you're going to be able to peel off and only use it intermittently over time. So I have not seen clinically anybody stop methylene blue and start feeling like just hasn't happened. I haven't anybody said I've been taking methylene blue for I've had people taking methylene blue for years now, and they don't take it for a week, they feel okay, they don't I mean usually if they're using it for that long a period of time it's because they have significant mitochondrial stress, so some of their symptoms may come back, but it's not like we're seeing in especially in higher-end people, we're not seeing especially intermittent use, like if people are using it more intermittently especially, there's no issues, right? If you if you're like an elite athlete and well let's say this: you're if you're a well-optimized athlete and you're you're great at your recovery, you have optimized oxidative status, you shouldn't be taking methylene blue every day, you should be taking it intermittently for the days that you're going to be putting yourself under more stress. Okay, but if you're not well-optimized, which is most people, then these lower doses, you know, four, eight milligrams can go a long way to supporting the system, and then you can use higher doses when you have more stress. But in essence, I have not seen clinically people stopping methylene blue and having a detrimental effect to that. But if they're on high doses of it, they're on like 50, 75 milligrams or something like that, which is rare, um then I don't usually like to to stop them cold turkey. You want to slowly wean them down over time. I mean, in essence, I only use those higher doses like a milligram to 2 milligrams per kilogram, so like 150 to 250 milligrams of methylene blue, I only use that for more acute stress like acute trauma, um acute ischemic episodes, which are rare, but I have my patients have them in their medicine cabinet just in case, um get not something that would preclude you from going to the hospital of course, but you know this is something that I have all my patients have just in case, acute infection as well as an antimicrobial, it could be really really good like that. And so but in essence, if you're on those higher doses, you want to wean people down instead of just stopping them. But if you're at four, eight, 12, 16 milligrams, these are low doses, and most people can come off them just fine.

Well, how does someone titrate their dose? How do they find their appropriate dose? So if you're looking at it for like a mitochondrial optimization goal, so your mitochondria aren't working well, remember you have brain fog, you have concentration problems, fatigue, uh you have muscle muscle fatigue with with exercise, these are mitochondrial symptoms overall. So in essence, what I do with almost everybody is that I start start titrating at very low doses, around four to eight milligrams of methylene blue, and I have them increase the dose every 3 to 5 days until they start feeling better. Now, now what does better mean? That depends on the person, right? If if it's just slightly better, maybe their mood is a little bit better, but they don't have this symptomatic relief that we're looking for, then we continue to go up on the dose. The average for most people we found is between eight and 25 milligrams of methylene blue, like that is the sweet spot from a mitochondrial optimization perspective, which is way less than some of these like liquid ones you find on Amazon and things like that, like people are taking like 50, 60 milligrams sometimes. Yeah, then that's a big problem I think is that I you don't need those higher doses for the most part for the mitochondrial piece. Now, if you have a severe issue, maybe those higher doses are going to be necessary, and so that's why I say it's always a titration game. So for my patients, I always start off there, but in some people I do need to go up to 35, 37.5, 50 milligrams, 75 milligrams, and I do use that for, but that's very rare. Most of the time it's going to be these lower doses that are super helpful. And then once you find the dose that works for you, then it's a question of how long you stay on it, and that question really goes to another question is why are you taking it in the first place? And what kind of symptomatic relief have you had? What else are you doing to support the mitochondria at the same time so that you can wean yourself off off of it. But in essence, once I find the right dose for patients, then I keep it on for at least two weeks typically at that dose, and then depending on the situation I'll start weaning them down from there if I can. Oftentimes usually, you know, the shortest is two weeks, but usually it's more like four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks kind of thing for more people that have more chronic issues, and then we can start weaning them down after that. But the the one thing that people have to always and the reason why it's so important I think to go low doses is that because it has this MAOI effect, this monoamine oxidase effect, the neurotransmitter ecosystem is going to change a little bit, and so when that's changing, it's important that you understand that it's going to change and that you go slowly because sometimes people can feel like the word I always get is funny, I feel funny, like just a little bit strange in the head overall, and that's because of the neurotransmitter ecosystem changing. And but that usually goes away after the first couple days of trying it and then getting used to the dosing, but it can be a little bit unnerving for some people, especially if they start off at a too high of a dose. I've had a couple people come to me at conferences after speaking and saying, you know, I my my doctor gave me 50 milligrams, I felt so terrible, my brain I got so depressed, and I didn't know what to do. And and this happened like it's more than a handful at this point, and this is because their system just wasn't ready for that high of a dose from an MAOI perspective, from a mitochondrial perspective. And yes, maybe they needed that dose because they had an infection or they had severe mitochondrial stress, but you don't want to start there under most circumstances. That was me when you first gave me my first uh, Troy. Yeah, you had given me a box and I didn't realize you had given me the Troy plus, and I took a full Troy. Oh no, okay.

I that's how I felt. I felt like I feel funny, like I couldn't focus, I couldn't like things, and I'm I'm pretty metabolically optimized, so it was probably just way too much for me. Yes, and I so I just like put it away. I'm like, okay, this I'm not going to use this again. And then and then I I looked at the difference between like the two packages you gave me. I was like, oh, like yeah, oh. And so then I took a quarter of a just blue, you know, Mig. I'm like, and that was money, like that was like, okay, this is what it's supposed to feel like. And like I'm a metabolically optimized person, so for me like four is all I really need. I just take four like usually four to four days a weekish, and then I take two or three days off. And then uh the same kind of thing. Then if I travel, I'll take, you know, maybe 12 or 16 or uh for me in the winter time if I'm like in crappy lighting all the time and I'm not getting sunlight, people think it's the opposite because like obviously it it works with UV and it works with light, which we can talk about a second, but like in the summer I actually take a little less. Like in the winter when I'm exposed to things, kids are bringing crap home every day, and I'm under fluorescent lights and I'm not getting that's when I increase my dose. Um, same thing on an airplane or just yeah, well you remember from our walk, one of our previous visits where I had too much methylene blue on board and we we did 117,000 degrees in it. It was legit 111 degrees; it was hot, and I couldn't figure out why I had I was getting heat stroke, like I you remember we we came was 111, it was hot. But but but I'm used to I'm used to heat stress, and so I couldn't figure out why. And then I realized that I had 16 milligrams of methylene blue on board because we were Trav I was traveling to come see you, and I usually take four or 8 milligrams, and I hadn't had 16 in a while, and I had to completely do like a core body temperature downgrade. I covered myself in your frozen dog food packet; it was hysterical. But but so be aware, you know, this is important, like as you're combining it with sunlight, heat stress, like you are going to make more energy, so you have to be aware of that. And so I had to very quickly, you know, get my body temperature down so I didn't have to go to the hospital, uh, which I was able to do fine because I knew it was happening. But but it is something to be aware of, you know. And and I use more, and I recommend my patients usually more use more in the winter as well.

Yeah, yeah. So what's um I mean we'll link out down below to transcriptions because you guys are pretty unique, but it's also it's an important thing to mention, a lot of products have heavy metals, a lot of things like that. It's like whether people choose transcriptions or not, which by the way, I mean I do recommend it legitimately; it's the one that I use; it's the best, and I'll link out to it down below. But what do people need to look for in a in a methylene blue product? And I know obviously, you know, in full transparency, I mean it's going to be you have a you know a meth blue company, so I mean full disclosure there, but let's say people choose to not go with you guys, what do they need to look for? I mean the first thing I always say is that it's like a plea please don't buy your supplements on Amazon, just please, you know, because you just don't know what you're getting. You may think it's the company that you're getting it from, but often times there's been millions and millions of dollars of crazy counterfeit on Amazon that I've heard of over the years. A company called metagenics, for example, they had all these people getting rancid metagenics products because they weren't actually metagenics at all; they were coming from an Amazon warehouse. So my first recommendation is to not buy it from Amazon. Okay. The second recommendation is that if you're looking at methylene blue, methylene blue is a synthetic component; it's a synthetic compound, so it doesn't come from the earth. We talked about this, and so as part of the the the manufacturing process, it can be contaminated with lead, caban mer, Mercury, and arsonic, and so you don't want any of that at all, right? And so you really want to make sure that the company that you're getting it from is testing for all of those, and so you should be able to get a certificate of analysis from your company, and they should be able to tell you that it doesn't have that stuff in it. Okay. The next thing is that it may have something called the USP. USP is very important. USP is a pharmaceutical grade label for your methylene blue, but unfortunately, this does not make it so that it's heavy metal free or that it's actually the potency that you think it might be. So potency, what I mean by that is that so if you get like a liquid methylene blue especially and it says that you're getting let's say 1 milligram full like per full dropper of methylene blue, we tested all many liquids; we tested maybe seven or eight liquids; this is about a year ago; none of the liquids met label claim, so none of them even came close to being a milligram or whatever it was per dropper; they were about 80%, 60 to 80% of the label claim, so you're getting weaker methylene blue almost always, actually one actually in one case it was actually 125% more as well, so it was all over the map. So I really don't like liquid because it's very difficult to dose; it gets everywhere; it's very very messy. At the same time, the potency and the Purity are all over the map. Okay. But if you're going to do it, you know, make sure you whatever your dose is, it's likely less than what you think it is. And when everybody anybody's converting from liquid to to one of our Troys, I'm always saying, look, the Troy is going to be stronger per milligram, you know, because we Precision dose everything, and we test everything compared to what you're getting on the liquid side. And so we have to be mindful of that, and I have a lot of people that have come up to me over the years and say, I took a liquid at this strength, and I took yours at the same strength; it was like night and day, and that's very very common. So you have to watch out for Purity uh with the heavy metals; you have to watch out for potency, which is often a challenge with liquids; and the USP is not a a blanket saying it's okay kind of thing. Even if they say USP methylene blue, ask for their certificate analysis. And this is the other thing; what we do, and this is so important because I'm a clinician; I'm using this with my patients; I'm using this with my family; I'm not going to just buy something online. And what we found over and over and over again, it's just so important to to tell your patients that with methylene blue, the start low and go slow number one. You make sure you're getting from a reputable source, and that um it's really important that you know that the bioavailability is really really good. So like even though we have Troys that um that dissolve in the mouth, you can swallow it as well, um and you can you can get the same mitochondrial benefits, but the Troy is going to be faster. So a lot of people don't want to have a blue mouth, and that's okay. Um, what I always say is if you're going to swallow it, make sure you swallow it on an empty stomach, then eat about 15 or 20 minutes later because that's going to help kind of push it in and make it work faster. That being said, if you have a lot of cognitive issues, a lot of brain fog, concentration issues, memory, if you dissolve in your mouth, even though your mouth will be blue, it's going to work faster that way, and that's a good thing if you have those kinds of issues, right? So um bioavailability for most compounds is not 100% if you swallow it, but which means that the whole amount that you take in is being used by the body. Often times we take things like a regular supplement; like I always give the example of knack, NAC, which is 10% bioavailable, so if you take 100 milligrams of knack, you only get 10 milligrams in the body. If you take 16 milligrams of methylene blue, you're going to get just about 16 milligrams in the body, which is good, um but the key with that all is that your thinking about you know how you're going to deliver it, the dosing, and then one thing I I forgot to mention is um oh it keeps I keep losing this part of oh yeah, so is the so when you're talking about certificates of analysis, I'm want to go back to that for a second. What we do at our company of transcription is that you know all of our products, all the ingredients come with certificate of a certificate of analysis already, but we don't trust that; we do it ourselves, and we check our own certificate analysis to make sure that it is the Purity and potency that the manufacturer of the ingredient told us that it was, and we've had to throw out thousands of worth of material because of this, and it's crazy; no other companies are doing this; they just get the certificate of analysis from the ingredient company and go, okay, let's make it right, but no, we don't do that; we we we test it again to make sure the Purity and potency is as is. One uh last question, it's uh you know you can get if you're metabolically healthy especially, you feel well, I guess everybody does, you feel a nice lift in energy from methylene blue, um any issues with taking in the afternoon, does it interfere with sleep, anything like that? I usually recommend dosing it, if you can dose it twice a day, dose it about 8:00 in the morning or whenever you wake up and maybe 12 or 1:00 in the afternoon. Okay. That being said, I do have patients that take it before they go to sleep, and they have no problem sleeping with it; in fact, because sleep is so metabolically active, as I think most people understand now that especially REM sleep is very metabolically active in the brain, they actually find they sleep better, and they get really good poops in the morning; that's what they tell me. This is like this is like five different people, like I poop so much better after I take methylene blue at night, like oh okay, interesting; this must be related to some sort of sympathetic autonomic system balance and and helping with metabolic energy and and inflammation; I don't know, but but in essence, because it has an effect on those neurotransmitters, the nephrine and dopamine specifically, I usually recommend when you first start it, try it in the morning, see how you feel, and then if you're going to dose it again, maybe 12 or 1 o'clock in the afternoon; that's typically what I do. I'll take it maybe 4 milligrams in the morning and another 4 milligrams in the afternoon, especially if I have a longer day. Sometimes I'll take a combination of of methylene blue with nicotine, caffeine, and CBD, like one of the other products that we have in the morning, and then I'll take the the the methylene blue pure, the just blue in the afternoon, just because that's a nice like nice ride for the end of the day without having the stimulation of the nicotine and caffeine. So that's a couple different options. I do have one more question: What about jet lag protocol? Because I know that's something you've helped me with using methylene blue just as a jet lag protocol? Oh, this is so glorious; this has been like a GameChanger for me and for my patients as well and for people that are using it, uh so methylene blue, as we mentioned, protects against altitude challenges, the the hypoxic nature of it, the inflammatory nature of it, the air, the water, the people; toxic people, I can only protect you so much from toxic people, but methylene blue but but it helps a little bit; helps a little bit. So the idea with methylene blue is that it's going to help protect you in all these ways, and so you know on our website, if you go to our blogs, you can find a whole jet lag protocol. But in essence, what you want to do is find the right methylene blue dosing for you already hypothetically, so you kind of know what gives you energy, what kind of gives you like, you know, good mood boost and those kinds of things. But in essence, it's usually higher doses when you travel than that, so and then you want to have a little bit before you get on the airplane, about 4 hours before you get on the airplane hypothetically, to kind of get yourself your system ready. And then about every 4 to 6 hours when you're on the plane, you want to take more methylene blue, depending how long you're going to be on the plane for. And then of course it depends on if you're have an overnight flight or whatever it might be, so you have to think about the timing in the sense of if you're going to be getting to someplace late, do you want to have a big dose of methylene blue before you get there? Probably not. So I use a lot of methylene blue um in just in variable doses for people, but when also when you get to your location, like when you get there, like the morning that you get to your new location, you're getting your methylene blue on board, um and you're doing that for 3 to 5 days when you get to your location; that's going to help reset your mitochondria, to help support that support your mitochondria, you know, while you're you know making this time shift or air shift or microbiota shift, everything else that's shifting when you when you travel. I also use a lot of GABAergic things as well when people travel because people get super stressed when they're on airplanes, and that's not good for your sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system. So um use the GABA aside, but but just blue pure methylene blue can go a long way to helping people, and it's been transformative for so many of my patients. And again, anybody that comes to Colorado that comes to visit, they get the jet lag protocol down; it's definitely that's probably the biggest thing I've noticed; the days that I fly, I don't feel crappy afterwards, which is pretty pretty much every time I fly otherwise. So um where can everyone find you? And where can everyone again, I'll link out the descriptions, but where can everyone find you guys? So we've been around, so the thing about transcriptions is that we were the first company to come out with a commercial product using methylene blue back in 2020. We have blogs, tons of blogs about methylene blue and all the various aspects that we spoke about today on our blog at transcriptions.com, and you can so we are the only company as well that has four doctors on the team, four practicing doctors, MDs that are seeing patients in clinical practice. There are no other companies. Now when we first started, we were one of one; now we're one of 70 or something like that, and that's totally fine, but we're still the only company that does the quality control, the Purity and potency control, that has doctors on the team, that has the you know the Longevity, if you want to call that, you in in this world doing it as long as we have. So if you want to learn more about it, I would go to chscripts.com; that's our website and our blog on Instagram at troscriptions; that's a great place to go as well, of course. And then my personal Instagram is Dr. Scott Sher, DS o TT s h RR, and I do a lot of work there, you know, try to bring education out to the the socials as best I can, and I I have my own clinical practice as well that's based on our nonprofit. So we have a nonprofit called Health Optimization Medicine and Practice, or HOME HOPE for short; it's a nonprofit that's training practitioners like me to how to optimize Health rather than focus on disease and creating the first standard of care for health, you know, there's a standard of care for every disease out there, but there's no standard of care for health, and so HOME HOPE is where transcriptions got its start; HOME HOPE is the nonprofit where we train and educate clinicians, licensed and non-licensed, and where we help people right now on the path to optimizing their health is at transcriptions. Right on, man; thanks, brother; good to see you.