In this interview, JJ Virgin and a medical expert discuss methylene blue, a synthetic compound first created in the 1870s as a textile dye and later recognized as the first FDA‑approved antimicrobial drug (1897). They trace its historical use as a broad‑spectrum antimicrobial (antiviral, antifungal, antiparasitic) and describe how it fell out of mainstream medicine after the 1950s. The conversation then shifts to modern applications, emphasizing methylene blue’s role as a low‑dose mitochondrial and redox support agent that can improve energy production, reduce inflammation, and help the body cope with hypoxic stress such as airplane travel, high altitude, and chronic fatigue. Practical dosing guidance is provided: a typical daily low dose ranges from 4 mg to 25 mg, starting at 4–8 mg and titrating upward every 3–5 days; higher short‑course doses (up to 150 mg) may be used for acute infections or trauma. The experts warn that higher doses increase hydrogen peroxide production, so adequate antioxidant and detox support (glutathione, binders, sauna, bowel regularity) is essential. Quality control is highlighted as a major concern—many commercial products, especially those sold on Amazon, may be contaminated with heavy metals or lack proper certificates of analysis. The speakers describe their rigorous testing protocol (multiple quarantine and retest steps) and stress the importance of sourcing from trusted manufacturers. Overall, the interview positions methylene blue as a potentially transformative supplement when used correctly, with careful dosing, supportive antioxidants, and verified product quality.
Chapters
Tell me about methylene blue. Is this worth the hype?
The thing about methylene blue is that it's been around for such a long time, but only over the last couple years has really kind of hit the zeitgeist.
What is it, first of all?
So it's a compound that was developed in a lab in 1870, or 1870s, 1-8-7-0, so a long time ago, developed as a textile dye to dye things blue. Like your shirt, for example, in the 1870s would have been dyed with methylene blue, or blue jeans from Levi Strauss. That would've been dyed with, with methylene blue. But what was interesting about this class of dyes is that there was a couple researchers at the time trying to figure out ways to treat infection. We didn't have anything back then. There was no antibiotics, no antimicrobials, and they figured out that high doses of methylene blue would kill pathogens but wouldn't harm the host, the human host. And that was like an amazing feat of engineering because we didn't have anything at the time. So methylene blue was the first. Fully synthetic drug that was registered with the FDA in 1897. Wow. So it doesn't come from the earth. It comes from ingredients that were made in labs. And sometimes people don't like that even in our natural space. But understanding that not everything synthetic is bad for us. You take insulin, that's synthetic for diabetes. If you have type 1 diabetes, if you go to the ER because you have a tracking infection up your leg and you don't get antibiotics, you could die. This happened to my son a couple of years ago. I was like watching the thing go up his leg. I'm like, ah, crap, you know, but I got to give him antibiotics, right? So we need synthetic things sometimes, and not everything natural is good for us, right? You can eat the wrong mushrooms and die of liver failure. So just be aware. And I've seen this in ICUs when I was in training. So methylene blue was developed as an antimicrobial, and by 1897 until about 1950, it was the premier antimicrobial, antiviral, antifungal, antiparasitic, antibacterial.
And was it only prescription then, or was it over the counter?
So that's a good question. I don't know if it was prescription. I don't think it was.
God.
So there was no big pharma. There was no big pharma. What if you Big Pharma was involved in like making your, your 7-Up with cocaine, you know, they were doing things like that. But there really was no pharma companies until Bayer, actually until, until 1950 or so. Bayer was also involved in German things that aren't great, but that was like the first pharmaceutical company making aspirin, right? I don't think it was prescribed per se, like, but I think, but doctors did use it a lot for urinary tract infections, et cetera. And if you were in World War II, you were shipped over to Japan, or that in the Pacific, you were taking it prophylactically to prevent infection. They called it going blue in the loo because if you take methylene blue, your urine will be blue.
Yes, I know that. I know that to be true.
And so that was the first way that methylene blue was used as an antimicrobial. And even until the 1960s, if you lived in a Soviet bloc country, you had a throat infection as a kid, your mom, most likely not your father, would be painting the back of your throat with methylene blue because it works as an antiviral, then putting people out in the sunlight because they knew inherently that the combination was actually profoundly anti-infective. The other major way we think about methylene blue, and not only as an anti-infective, is as a, a profound mitochondrial support. It— we were talking about ourselves being gasoline-powered cars. We make waste. What methylene blue can do is it can compensate both on the metabolic side of the challenges making energy and also on the side of detoxification because it works on both sides, helps with energy and detoxification.
Wow.
There's very few compounds out there that are like that. The key with the methylene blue though is that it has to be low dose for this, like usually around 4 milligrams to 25 milligrams. The stuff that you have is way too high of a dose. And so that 4 to 25 milligram dosing is that redox support that we all, many of us, 94% of us can benefit from. The biggest example of this is if you like to go on airplanes or you have to go on airplanes. So most planes are pressurized to about 8,000 feet. Above sea level, which means that you're low oxygen on an airplane. So you go from where you live, which is mostly at sea level, to an airplane that you're at 8,000 feet. All of a sudden they close the cabin door, you start feeling like tired and a little, uh, a little groggy. That's because your oxygen level went from about 21% in the air that you're breathing at sea level to about 17 or 18% on the airplane.
They should have like Peloton bikes or something there, and then you could get some hypoxic training in.
You could, right? You can definitely do the intermittent hypoxic training. There we go. I do have a couple guys that I know that have G7s with hypoxic training on their bikes.. But, um, in any respect, what methylene blue can do is it can compensate for that low oxygen level. Wow. It can prevent you from having a deterioration of energy production because you have methylene blue around. It can work just like oxygen in those cases and clean up the mitochondria, prevent you from having more inflammation, everything that happens additionally from being on a plane.
And altitude, I would assume.
Yes.
Altitude.
Altitude is huge. So even if you're on a G7, you know, which is nice, maybe one day I'll be one. Even you're still getting more of the radiation stress of being closer off the, the earth's surface.. And so you're getting more stress even being on the G7, but it's not as much as being on an 8000.
Is this something you could take every single day or not necessary or what?
Depending on how healthy you are in general and more resilient you are already, well, how much methylene would you actually need? So my people that have chronic complex illness, that have chronic brain fog, chronic fatigue, mental health issues, they might need Methylene Blue on a regular basis for a period of time. It's gonna take you 6 months or a year to get better, but we can give you things along the way. Methylene Blue is one of those things that I give oftentimes., and it's that mitochondrial support that so many of us need to be able to downregulate our nervous system that we were talking about too. Whereas if I just downregulate somebody's nervous system without giving them enough mitochondrial support, they're gonna feel like crap when we downregulate them, and it's not gonna get better until we do. Low dose is around 4 to about 25 milligrams is my dosing range for most people. And I don't like people to start off at, at a higher dose, even at the higher range. I like to start, start off at 4, 8, maybe 12.5 milligrams. Then see how they feel.
Time of day matter?
Mornings are usually better because methylene blue can be activating. It doesn't give you like a stimulant kind of feel, but it does increase serotonin and norepinephrine a little bit as well. So you have to be aware of that. When you're taking methylene blue and you're relatively well optimized, what it should feel like is just that you're elevated and you're up and you're good.
And you feel like— I might wanna run downstairs and take some of the stuff you brought right now.
Yeah. Yeah. I take it on days where I have more stress, more travel. Bad sleep or something big that's going on that day from an endurance perspective, if I'm doing some extra working out.
Mm-hmm.
Because in those cases, your mitochondria are more stressed and so you wanna give it additional support so you can do more. Now, if you're somebody that's coming from a place where you're more stressed every day because your mitochondria are under significant duress, you may need to take Methylene Blue on a regular basis for a period of time. In some of my patients, it's been months or sometimes even years, but by the— I'm slowly decreasing their dose over time, but I always start off the same for everybody. I have start everybody like 4. 8 milligrams typically. Increase the dose every 3 to 5 days. So take it daily for 3 to 5 days. It's not one of those things that builds up in your body over 30 days, over a year. It's like, no, if it doesn't work after 3 or 5 days, increase the dose. If it doesn't work after another 3 to 5 days, increase the dose. Now, the reason why you want to go slow and not go so high of a dose like the other stuff that you had is that you get to about a milligram per kilogram, which is around 50 milligrams to 70 milligrams for most people. It still can be mitochondrially supportive, but at the same time, it starts increasing the production of hydrogen peroxide in the system. Hmm. So hydrogen peroxide, you know, you can buy it at the store, but your cells make it. They make it as an anti-infective. They make it as an anti-cancer. They make it as a way to kill off cells that shouldn't be there. So that's good, except if your body can't tolerate that, which many people can't if they're already under significant stress and antioxidant deficiencies. Because when you have more hydrogen peroxide around, You make more glutathione, at least you try to. Hmm. If you can make enough glutathione, you should feel okay. But if you can't, you're not gonna feel very good. People telling me like, hey doc, I, I started taking Methylene Blue and I felt like crap. I'm like, well, how much did you take? Like, I took a lot. I was like, well, this is why. And then, and, and you need a lot of good detox support. So I have patients of mine with chronic infections that I use the higher doses, but I'm always giving them antioxidant support. I'm always giving them, you know, binder support as well. So they're making sure they're pooping every day. They're going in the sauna, they're doing all the other things because it's going to cause some stress on the system. I can even give higher doses for acute infection, acute trauma. I give up to 150mg, about 2mg per kilogram for 3 to 5 days as an antiviral, as an anti-infective in general. My mom was bitten by a tick in New York where she lives, and we gave her Doxy, which is for Lyme, because I'm not stupid and I don't want her to get Lyme.
You're not stupid.
I try not to be. I try not to be most of the time. But I also gave her the methylene blue., and she got 100, 150 milligrams for 5 days. She felt amazing.
Number 1, where were you when I got bit by that bug in the Amazon?
Yeah, you need to have your Methylene Blue with you, right? That's what I, with all my patients, I have, you have to have it in the medicine cabinet or whatever.
Yeah.
Just in case at the higher doses. But on a regular basis, it could be transformative to people. It's a bridge for so many people because it gets you from like point A maybe to like H, I, or J. So you've skipped a whole bunch of steps so that you have more support that all of a sudden you feel like you can do more. And that bridge has allowed you to change your diet, get out of a bad relationship, get a sleep divorce, whatever it might be that you need to do that you, you couldn't get there if you hadn't had that support. And that's why it can be so great for so many people. And the other big thing about it is just quality.
With all supplements, quality. Yes. Peptide supplements, hormones, quality, quality. Because make sure they're testing, testing, and testing, right?
And that's not just trusting the testing from their manufacturer of the ingredient. And, you know, we're talking about this— layers of testing, layers of testing, right? So you get an ingredient, say it's methylene blue in this case, from a manufacturer. If it says it's from the US, they're lying. I had somebody a couple weeks ago that said to me, hey doc, I bought this methylene blue online from Amazon. It said it was made in the US, but it took 3 weeks to get through customs.
That's so interesting.
So interesting, right?
So weird.
This is what happens, right? And so methylene blue in this case comes into the United States from us. We get it from Japan and Korea, actually. It comes to a trusted manufacturer here with a certificate of analysis that says it meets all of our specifications, right?
Right. But then they have to quarantine it and then they test again, right?
That's what we do. But many companies do not do this. They just trust their manufacturers and say, oh, it came with a C of A.
No, we don't do it. And you have to quarantine it and you have to test. It was, it's so interesting when we get something that we end up having to backorder because it came in and they quarantine it and retest it, and you're like, kind of like, oh, but you want that.
You have to.
And so it is, it is the downfall of all of this is when you do these things correctly, not everything passes, right?
And we've had to throw out thousands of dollars worth. It took us a year longer to launch the company. So we were the first company to come out with a commercial product with methylene blue back in 2020, one month before the pandemic. Wow. First company to do it. So before that, you had to go to like a chemistry lab or someplace online and buy it from there, which is not something you'd want to do. And so it took us a year longer to launch. And still, even with the same trusted manufacturers over the years, we've had to throw out thousands of dollars because it can contaminate— all supplements can be contaminated, but methylene blue specifically could be contaminated with lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic. And even if it says USP methylene blue, we've tested a lot of that stuff. It doesn't meet the criteria, unfortunately, because of its potency. So it doesn't meet label claim for the milligram dosage or its purity with the heavy metal concentrations. And so liquids are the biggest culprits here because liquids, they're just, they, they lose potency very quickly. And you, you know, somebody in their garage could just go on Amazon and say, hey, here's my methylene blue.
And I saw this a number of times, like even from people, like I was like, I feel like Amazon should really, there should be some kind of scrutiny here on these things. It's just really frustrating as a supplement producer to deal with this where you're competing against these garbage brands. And yeah, great marketing and cheap prices.
Yeah. I always tell my patients, and I say it online all the time, do not buy your supplements on Amazon, please. The only exception, the caveat is if you're going to buy them, buy them directly from the company that you trust. Do not get them from an Amazon warehouse because you don't know what's in that warehouse. There's been millions of dollars of counterfeit stuff that we've seen from, you know, reputable companies by name, right? With their labels on there, but it's not their stuff.
