Optimizing Brain, Gut, Energy and Sleep: Scott Sherr, MD on Methylene Blue and More

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Dr. Scott Scher, a board-certified internal medicine physician and the COO of Troscriptions. He's certified in health optimization medicine, abbreviated HOM, and specializes in hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Scott's mission is to make complex science easy to understand and apply. Through his clinical work, teaching, and media appearances, he helps people and practitioners use hyperbaric oxygen therapy and home principles to boost brain health, energy, and resilience. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. And if you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my recently updated free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool or functional medicine test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now onto the show. Welcome to the podcast, Scott.

Thank you for having me, Lindsey. It's good to be here.

It's my pleasure. So I noticed in emails I've gotten that your company, Prescriptions, seems to be under Quicksilver or joined with Quicksilver since we last spoke. Can you elaborate on that partnership? Oh yeah.

So that's, so it's, we haven't joined forces from a company-wide perspective. What we're doing is that the Quicksilver team, they live very close to my house actually. Their, their headquarters is here in Colorado. I've known Chris Shade for many years and we've become very friendly as companies. And what Quicksilver has that we do not as a company is a sales force. And so they have a sales team that is available throughout the country to go to practitioners' offices and to talk about products. And so we are, we are working with their sales force to get the word out about transcription. About our products and about how they could be integrated in various practitioner protocols, everything from gut optimization and working at bacterial overgrowth to optimizing mitochondrial function in the brain, the heart, everywhere else too. So we're, we're excited about the partnership and that's, that's the, that's the story.

Oh, okay. So you're going to be sold through Quicksilver?

No. So we have our own separate portal, like our separate website. So if you're a practitioner, you would sign up through our own site itself, like transcriptions.com. You'd go set up as a practitioner, but a sales rep from Quicksilver might be coming to your office. This and talking about our products along with Quicksilver products together and how you can integrate them in various ways and, and protocols and things like that. So that's so separate, but separate ecosystems, but very much communicating across both when it comes to products and protocols and services and, and things like that.

Oh, okay. Interesting. So I know one of the flagship products of Transcriptions is methylene blue, and I'd heard of it before and know that it's been around for more than 100 years and used in hospitals for various things. So can you talk first about its historical use before we dig into the more modern uses?

Yeah, I think it's all very applicable too. So, well, except maybe the first application because methylene blue was originally actually developed and synthesized as a textile dye in manufacturing. So back in the 1870s, it was used to dye blue jeans blue, for example. So if you were getting a pair of Levi Strauss in 1860, you were getting blue jeans that were dyed with methylene blue as the coloring. So it's a very, very blue color, but they were doing a lot of work around the late 19— late 1800s up into the 20th century trying to figure out various antimicrobials that might be available. And they looked at this class of what's called thiazine dyes, which is the, the type of classification of, of methylene blue. And they figured out that actually it had a fantastic capacity to be an antimicrobial. And it became the first drug that was registered with the FDA back at the time to treat malaria. And what was cool about methylene blue, and still is today, is that you could give very high doses of methylene blue and you would kill pathogens, but you wouldn't harm actually the normal host. And it was very difficult to find certain types of certain types of compounds like that. And that's why it became a very popular and actually the sort of primary antimicrobial around between about 1897 into the 1950s when antimicrobials came on the scene like penicillin and, you know, the like, et cetera. And so if you were in World War II, if you were a soldier, you were going down over to the Pacific, you had to take prophylactic methylene blue because it prevent fungal infections. And they had songs about going blue in the loo, which is because methylene blue concentrates in the urine. Hence, when you urinate, you've been taking methylene blue, you're gonna have blue urine as well to a certain, to a certain degree or another. And so we've known now again for over 100 years that methylene blue is a fantastic antimicrobial. And typically at higher doses it can really do that. It's an anti, it's really great for urinary tract infections. It used to be used a lot for that. Gram-negative organisms, specifically parasites, protozoa, and is also some antiviral capacity to it as well. And it's been used as an antiviral in very, in all places around the world. If you lived in the Soviet block countries, until the 1960s or so, if you were a child and had a sore throat, your mom probably, or your dad, but probably your mom would paint the back of your throat with methylene blue or give you a methylene blue lollipop to suck on because it would help with the throat infections. And so it's got, it's a really nice antiviral antimicrobial capacity at these higher doses. So that's how it's gotten its, it's got its start. Then from there, that was its first chapter. From there, the first antipsychotics were derived from methylene blue because methylene blue also works as called a monomethylamine. Amino acid inhibitor. So it increases serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine in the synapse. And so it prevents those from being broken down. And so the first antipsychotics were derived from it. And then it got its, its next sort of chapter in the world of cellular staining. So if you were in chemistry class, as I was, and you were using methylene blue, it was actually to look at various areas of your cell. The most important one in this case actually was the mitochondria. Because we know methylene blue concentrates in the mitochondria of our cell and helps support mitochondrial function in various ways, which we can obviously get into if you, if you'd like. And it has this really cool capacity helping both, both with energy production and detoxification in the mitochondria. And so over the last several decades, that's where a lot of interest has really been focused is in how methylene blue works on mitochondrial function and how it can support energy and detoxification. Because the statistics are pretty terrible out there that about 94% of US adults have some element of metabolic dysfunction really does equate to mitochondrial dysfunction as well.

Mm-hmm. And you didn't mention the one use that I really heard about it for, which was cyanide poisoning.

Yeah. So cyanide poisoning. So the, so methylene blue still is under the World Health Organization's list of essential medications because it's used for cyanide poisoning, which is obviously rare. But it also uses something for something called methemoglobinemia, which is a condition when you can't carry oxygen red blood cells. It's pretty uncommon too, but every emergency room in the country has to have methylene blue available for these particular diagnoses. What happens with cyanide poisoning is that cyanide destroys part of your complex 4, destroys part of your mitochondria called complex 4, which is a very important protein on the electron transport chain. So without that, you can't make energy very well at all. And, but methylene blue can rescue that by various ways of kind of doing this sort of ninja kung fu moves around complex 4 blockages to prevent you from having the whole system stop working.

That's an official chemistry term, right? Ninja kung fu.

Yeah. I mean, I can go into the, you know, the deep down.

That's okay. I'm just teasing you. Yeah, no, you probably don't need to do that. You've probably gone way deeper than most of my listeners can probably follow, but I appreciate that.

That's why I went ninja kung fu and I, instead of going like, you know, bypass complex 4, go through the membrane, do this, do that. Like, because it's got these really cool ways of doing it, but the, but in essence, why we think and why actually we know that methylene blue could be so powerful from a mitochondrial perspective is because of some of the data around cyanide poisoning and how methylene blue has this ability to recycle various things and then also bypass various things that might be blocked or dysfunctional. And, and this, this not only equates or translates to, you know, being poisoned with cyanide, it, it's also people that have had toxin exposure, medications that have caused significant injuries to their mitochondria, infections that have insulin resistance. So look, insulin resistance is actually the number one cause of mitochondrial dysfunction because if you have too much glucose around, your system tries to make too much energy with all that glucose and the whole system starts breaking down in the mitochondria. And then like a big category, which is if you're under chronic stress all the time, chronic stress at work, chronic stress at home, et cetera, that causes all these fight or flight chemicals like these, it's called your sympathetic nervous system that gets stays in like sort of the fight or flight mode, but your norepinephrine, your dopamine, your cortisol, which is, which is your stress hormone. These really stress the mitochondria as well. And so the key to understand all of this is of course like, well, what's happening on the meta, the big level that's causing all of this and to address that. But like right now to help support mitochondrial function, methylene blue can be a fantastic bridge as you're working on really understanding how you can do it over the long term.

Mm-hmm. So obviously with all these prior historical uses, it must be safe in acute situations. What about the data and like long-term use of it?

Yeah, so when it comes down to methylene blue, the safety is very, very good. It's mostly been used short-term in studies. It hasn't been done over multiple years for the most part. Typically the studies are done for 6 to 8 weeks at a time, sometimes 12 or 18 weeks depending on what they're exactly looking at. But it, the understanding the physiology of it and understanding the safety in the acute setting, like the safety in the acute setting is actually quite good overall. Even at very high doses, it's typically quite good. And then if you're looking at low doses, it seems to be very safe, at least clinically, over long periods of time if needed. And when I'm talking about like high and low, I, I should define that a little bit, right? And so what I'm talking about from like a low-dose perspective is typically anywhere between 4 and 25 milligrams per— so, or so, as opposed to higher doses for infection, especially acute infection, is anywhere between 1 and 2 milligrams per kilogram, which is gonna be anywhere between about 70 to 150 mg of methylene blue on a daily basis. And, and that's typically used for a much shorter period of time unless you have like a very significant need for infection control. Like if you have chronic Lyme, chronic mold, chronic viral infection, then you may need to be on these for longer. But my overall gestalt here, the way I seen it in clinical practice, is it's very rare that we need to be on those high doses for long periods of time. Typically the dose is gonna be much lower than that. From a safety profile perspective, we care about a couple different things. You don't wanna take methylene blue for if you're pregnant or breastfeeding because there might be some interactions there. It also interacts with high blood pressure medications. So if you're on high antihypertensive medications, it, it may raise your blood pressure. So you have to be aware of that. It's dose dependent though. So like typically low doses won't do it as much as, as high doses. It also works and increases that serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. So if you're on medications that increase those medications like SSRI medications, antidepressants, or some of the newer generations ones, you have to be a little bit more mindful and work with a practitioner if you're gonna be on those meds and taking Methylene Blue because there can be interaction. The, the risk of having something severe happen is very low. The risk that it's talked about in the literature is something called serotonin syndrome, which is very rare, but it's possible, especially very high doses of methylene blue. If you're taking IV methylene blue, especially, I would very much not take IV methylene blue with those medications on board. But if you're having those medications, if you're on those medications and you're taking methylene blue at the same time, you really need to work with a practitioner just to be sure you're safe. It also treated in the kidneys, and so you wanna make sure that that if you're, if you have renal dysfunction that you're watching very closely with a, with a practitioner, if you, if you're on dialysis, you should not take methylene blue because it's not gonna get excreted. I don't even know if it gets out in the dialysate. I don't think it does. So those would be some reasons to be more, more wary about taking it. But in essence, like for these low doses are extremely safe and extremely well tolerated. Now, can you get like detox kinds of symptoms? Sure. Like if you're starting something where you're creating more energy and detoxification capacity, if you start, certainly If you start off with too high of a dose, what, what can happen is that the system may not be ready for the energy and detox capacity you just gave it. And so you can get some symptoms related to that. Lower doses don't typically cause that issue, and that's why I usually recommend, you know, slowly titrating the dose over time, not starting off at 50 milligrams mostly unless it's an acute issue, starting off at 4 or 8 or 16 and then increasing your dose slowly over time until you start seeing what's most beneficial and mitigate some of the potential downsides of going up too fast.

Okay. So you mentioned it as an antimicrobial. Mm-hmm. And I, I work in gut health, so one of my biggest concerns in helping people heal their gut is not to give them anything that might harm their beneficial bacteria. So, right. How does methylene blue stack up in that area? And can it be used at a dose sufficient to eliminate pathogens without wiping out beneficial microbes?

Right. So that, there's always a balance here, but what I usually like to delineate is like around the milligram per kilogram dose, around 50 to 70 milligrams, like that's when we get to be more antimicrobial and that's when we can use it for pathogens. Pathogens. We can use it for bacterial overgrowth, we can use it for parasites, we can use it for protozoa, et cetera. When you do this, you're also going to be affecting normal bacteria and, and commensals as well. So you have to be aware of that. Short-term, I haven't seen any major problem that's not like using a nuclear bomb, like an antibiotic typically, where I haven't seen significant decimation of all commensals, but I have seen the commensal populations go down while you're also on these higher amounts of methylene blue. But short-term, 5 to 7, maybe up to 14 15 days, I have a lot of my colleagues that are using it for bacterial overgrowth and for parasites and seeing significant benefit without having to do a huge amount of additional cleanup afterwards to rebuild all the commensals as they would've if they'd given them Flagyl or, or something like that, like, like an antimicrobial. So I think it's like one of those, the way I think about it, Lindsey Parsons is sort of, it's not, it's one of those things in the middle where it's not gonna be like your berberine, olive oreganos and, and things like that, which are kind of natural antimicrobials that are not gonna cause a huge amount of of challenges to your commensals, usually, unless you're using 'em for long periods of time at high amounts. As, and it's not gonna be like your antibiotics where it's gonna decimate everything. It's sort of in the middle when you're talking about that kind of dosing. But if you're keeping the dosing super low, like 4 to 25 milligrams or so, I haven't seen any major detrimental effects on microbial commensals and, and things like that in the gut. I've only seen really it happen at higher amounts. So the lower amounts, like the, the lower dosing, I've only seen be beneficial from mitochondrial perspective, energy and detoxification, et cetera, without causing any major detrimental effects. And, and I've had people on more these sort of antimicrobial combinations of things where they've used methylene blue as a way to kind of support energy and detoxification while they're on those and see significant benefit. I know that you have your own perspective here. I think, remember you and I talked about how you don't typically use a lot of the antimicrobials anymore. You don't use a lot of the oil oregano and the berberines of the world, or, or do you use those as well?

As well? I use them sort of after everything else has failed. Right. But, but I try to avoid them. I try and use things like, yeah, SBI powder or butyrate, pomegranate husk, things that are more selective. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

That's, that's what I anticipated. And so what I've, what I've seen with methylene blue, it's like, it's, it's a little bit stronger than your berberine and olive oregano combination. So it's going to work faster. So in certain people that I used to have 3 or 6 months to see their gut get better using that kind of combination. Instead, I'm using the Methylene Blue for a shorter period of time, 7 to 14 days, and at a higher amount, 50 to 70 milligrams in one, one dose or divided doses in a day, and then seeing significant benefit much faster. Like, I've been actually quite shocked where 3 or 4 days into a higher dose of Methylene Blue, their brain function gets like completely better. Like, they're feeling significant amounts of more energy. So much energy, so much that we have to be actually careful. Like, they're like, oh my God, I have so much energy. And so that's actually been very interesting to me to see where, you know, with the berberine or oregano combinations, which I still use, doesn't typically happen that fast for people. It's much of a, it's a slower process. And that's not necessarily a bad thing either when you're trying to also repopulate the gut at the same time. So it's a bit of a balance as to when to use it and when not to. But, you know, overall, the majority of people that I'm thinking about using Methylene Blue, it's not going to be directly for their gut. It's typically going to be more for mitochondrial function, energy detoxification, and detox protocols when they're on them for the gut as well. Like, a good example is a lady I was just talking to a couple weeks ago was on a gut protocol using binders, using antioxidants, and doing the sauna. And, you know, she was feeling pretty good, but like when she did the sauna, she'd feel kind of depleted and tired and, and a little washed out afterwards. But she added in the methylene blue, just low dose, just 12 milligrams. Before she went into the sauna and afterwards she felt like a different person. Like her energy was great, felt a lot of focus. She could do the whole day without crashing. And, and that's because the methylene blue, what it was doing at that low dose was just supporting energy and detoxification, but not just the detox side. The thing about like most of our protocols is they so focus on detox, detox, detox, detox, but they don't focus on the energy side of things. And that's when people feel washed out. That's when they feel tired and they just feel kind of crappy. But if you you can focus more on the energy side along with the detox, that's when you can actually have people that don't feel as washed out and fatigued when they're doing these kinds of protocols. Because that's, that's a big problem that I found, at least in clinical practice, is that there's a lot of detox that's required both in the gut, otherwise in the cells, and, and that could be hard. It can, and it may not feel very good. And then you have binders and you have antioxidants and making sure people are pooping every day. Like those are really important. But if you're just working on detox, but you're not helping on the energy side, like that's when people don't feel very good. So adding the energy side to it has been transformative for, you know, many people that I've worked with.

Yeah. So are you talking about like offsetting a Herxheimer reaction or are you talking about detox with regard to liver protocols or mycotoxins or heavy metals?

All the above, right? Because what's happening on the, on the Methylene Blue side is that it's working as, as a detoxifier really in the mitochondria itself.

Health.

Okay. And so if your mitochondria are stressed, there's a lot of reactive oxygen species, whether it's from heavy metal exposure in the liver or if it's in the, your gut cells because of toxicity as well in your gut lining. It's, it's gonna work in the mitochondria, in the cells, and also in the cytosol of the cell as well. It's gonna bind up free radicals and it's gonna bind up toxins, bind up heavy metals, bind reactive oxygen species. It's gonna do it all. And so that's why it's has such significant potential across multiple different things, right? So it's not like it's just doing one or one very specific reactive oxygen species neutralization reaction. It's really there as something that could be comprehensively supportive.

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The half-life is about 4 to 6 hours. So in people that need it for more energy detoxification, mitochondrial support, I'm giving it maybe once or twice a day depending on the person. Typically would be dosed at 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock in the morning, and then another dose about 12 or 1 o'clock in the afternoon. It's not usually stimulating. It's not a stimulant per se. Day, but in some people they will feel a lot of energy from it. And so that's why I typically dose it at those times. There are some exceptions to that rule where actually they'll take it before they go to bed and sleep better when they take it because they're getting more mitochondrial support during, you know, glymphatic cleaning. And also, and obviously REM sleep is, is very metabolically heavy as well. So this could be a reason why some people feel better when they sleep with it, but that's the kind of the rare occurrence. What I sometimes will do though, if, if they start, if they feel like some people don't need it twice a day, some people, sometimes they just need it in the morning, but it is usually is depending on how they feel from a mitochondrial perspective. When it comes to anti-infective, I typically like to dose it twice daily just to give it more time to do its work. Where instead of one dose in the morning, it's typically, if it's a 50 milligram gold dose, or then it's 25 milligrams in the morning and 25 milligrams comes at noon, you know, that kind of thing. Or as a, as, as just an example, that's what I typically would prefer instead of one larger dose in the morning to this, that same dose divided into two doses as an anti-infective. The way it works as an anti-infective, which might be interesting as well for, at least for you, Lindsey, is that it, it increases hydrogen peroxide production. So methylene blue, what it does at higher amounts is that increases the amount of hydrogen peroxide the cells make.. So we know that we can buy hydrogen peroxide at the store, but our cells actually make hydrogen peroxide as a, as a primary way to be an anti-infective. It also makes other free radicals like hydroxyl radicals and, and other kinds of things to make more capacity to kill bugs. And you can actually combine methylene blue with red light specifically at high intensities, high intensity red light, high amounts of methylene blue to create more reactive oxygen species at higher amounts to be more anti-infective.

Effective.

Lower amounts of methylene blue with red light are actually supportive for the mitochondria. So it's just kind of depending on the dose and the frequency and the power of the light and the methylene blue together. But from an anti-infective capacity, methylene blue makes these hydrogen peroxide amount higher in the body. Also some of these other free radicals, especially if you add red light. But what that does is it kills bugs, it kills cancer cells as well. That's how our body does that. But it also stimulates the body's own mechanisms to produce this antioxidant in the body called glutathione. Right? And so that sounds good except if you don't have the capacity to make glutathione. And that's why it's important at these higher amounts of methylene blue to be giving antioxidant support typically at the same time to be giving the binders if we're trying to get people to get rid of toxins at the same time. And so hydrogen peroxide's really important. That's how it works. But it's also something that, you know, has to be, be understood that that's why they've done some really interesting studies where they've looked at Methylene Blue for Alzheimer's, for example, and they've done like the, the placebo group, group was 8 milligrams twice a day. And they did 2 treatment groups. One was 75 milligrams twice a day, one was 150 milligrams twice a day. Okay. And so what they found in this particular study is that the placebo group, the sham group, the ones that got 8 milligrams twice daily, they gave everybody some Methylene Blue, by the way, in the study because because if they didn't give them methylene blue, their urine would not be blue. They wanted everybody's urine to be blue. So the placebo group, the sham was 8 milligrams twice daily. That group did the best by far. And I think the reason why is that because at these higher amounts of methylene blue, the brain, the body was producing a lot of hydrogen peroxide. The body, the brain in, in patients with Alzheimer's, probably antioxidant deficient, probably messed up gut as well, right? To not check those many studies for many things, right? And so you had these patients that with the higher amounts that didn't do very well with the methylene blue. And so my estimation here, looking at the research and the data, is it's because they were giving too high of a dose. And so these lower doses could be very supportive, but these higher doses can be great as an anti-infective, but you gotta give support along the way. Otherwise you might get into some trouble with some herxing detoxification kinds of symptoms. But oh, the one, one point I wanna mention on detox too is that mitochondria per cell, like most people don't realize that we have some cells in our body that have thousands of mitochondria per cell, the liver being one of those places. And we have some cells in our body that have zero or very few mitochondria per cell. And we have zero mitochondria in our red blood cells. Actually, red blood cells carry oxygen. They've lost their mitochondria. They did have 'em, but they lost it so they can carry more oxygen. The number one place in our body that has the most mitochondria per cell. In a female, it's eggs. In male, sperm. Right after that, it's the brain, and then it's the heart and the liver. So huge amount of mitochondria per cell are required in these areas to maintain energy demands. And this is why fertility rates are going down, right? Brain function, cognitive issues, attention, focus, Alzheimer's, neurodegenerative disorders— these are mitochondrial issues at their base. And so there's a lot that we need to do, especially heal the gut. Like, that's probably number one, because if you're not healing your gut, you have a leaky gut, you also have a leaky brain. And that's when things also go, go sideways in the brain too, as you very well know, Lindsey Parsons. And so I always like to give the big picture here that like, I don't think that using methylene blue is the only thing that people need to do by any means, but it's a great way to start supporting mitochondria now. Improving mitochondrial function, energy detoxification, and so that everything else gets a little bit easier along the way while you're doing your, your gut cleanup, while you're doing your, you know, you're optimizing your vitamins and minerals and your hormones and things like that. I mean, it all goes together, but what's nice about Methylene Blue is that it's an immediate thing that can help with mitochondrial function and also, if needed, be supportive on the anti-infective side, you know, in the, in the gut itself.

So you're describing it almost like a multivitamin, something that everyone should just have going in the background. And I'm sure that people are getting overwhelmed by like all these new supplements that are must-haves. Now, it wasn't good enough that we have our omega-3s. Now we're supposed to have our Fatty 15 and you know, it just keeps, it just keeps adding up. So, right. I'm wondering, is there something that methylene blue replaces in the pile of supplements that people have to take who are chronically ill and trying to get better?

Think about it as your bridge, because taking something like an omega-3 or maybe Fatty 15, even, I don't, I know that's a newer, fancier one that everybody didn't know that they needed to have. What I always say is this, Lindsey, is that the best way to understand what you need is to test what you need, right? And testing what you need. If you need B vitamins, you need to take B vitamins. B vitamins, but you're not gonna feel better on your B vitamins immediately. It's gonna take 3 or 6 months to rebuild your cellular stores of these kinds of things. If you have low omega-3, omega-6 levels, you need to be taking those, right? Even if your omega-6 levels are low, you need to be taking omega-6 because omega-6 is important too. Even though we all get crazy about seed oils, I'm gonna talk about the right type of omega-6s as well. So the key is to understand that all of us in an ideal world should be measuring our metabolic data and understanding what we need and then taking things that are related to that.

Okay?

Okay, that's your base, that's your foundation. In my closet behind me, that's— I have a base level of supplements that I take every day depending on what my labs show me every 3 or 6 months that says this is what my deficiencies are, this is what my toxicities are, this is what my gut's doing, this is what my gut's not doing, why is my gut doing this again, why is my, you know, whatever. And so, and, but this is the nature of being human. There's no end of the road except when we're no longer breathing. Okay? Because we live and we go here, we go there and we have kids and then your daughter makes apple cake for Thanksgiving and then you have too much of it and like whatever, right? And so I'm not speaking from personal experience or anything, of course. My daughter loves to bake. And so for the holidays, I'm forced to eat gluten, which I don't typically eat. But anyway, all good. And so that's your foundation. Now, most of those things that are in your foundation are not typically there to make you feel better tomorrow only. They're really, they should be the things that are gonna help you with your foundation the next 3 to 6 months. Okay. Now there are things though that we can use to support that, that can help you right now while you're on that longer path. Okay. And that's where things get a little bit more confusing, right? Because you can take this supplement for this and that supplement and like, well, what about this? And, you know, I get, I get also on these trains sometimes trialing various things that don't necessarily directly point to a specific biomarker for example, right? So that's where you can have a little more, I call it fun, but, but also in that same category are things that can help you make that bridge to get you from where you are now to where you will hopefully want to be in 3 or 6 months. And that's where methylene blue really does shine. I don't think it's something that people need to take all the time for the rest of their life. I think it's one of those things where you can take it maybe a decent amount in the beginning when you're working on mitochondrial function. You're coming in from a place where you have chronic complex medical illness, you've had mold, you've had Lyme, you've had chronic stress and you're like, I just need to feel better. That's where methylene blue can really come in, I think, whereas it gives this beautiful synergy with mitochondrial support while you're doing the harder work of optimizing your diet, your lifestyle, your supplementation, your stress, getting out of a toxic relationship, getting out of a toxic job and doing something else that you love, a death in the family, like, you know, bad stuff that can really be difficult initially, like get yourself out of those patterns now or help you and then in really working on the long term. So that's how I see Methylene Blue being used even in the gut, like overall as a, as a way to help with gut dysbiosis and parasites and things like that. You're not using it long term. That's more directed for what you need really is that you're using it short term to help move the needle faster for you. So if you wanna move the needle faster and more supported, that's where Methylene Blue comes in. And then when you're more optimized and you're feeling better, then you don't need it as often., and then you can use it sort of as needed when you have more stress, when you have more challenges or cognitive load, or you're traveling, for example, like traveling is a big stress on the body. When you're on an airplane, you're at low oxygen levels on a plane compared to sea level. You know, sea level has 21% oxygen. On a plane, you're pressurized about 8,000 feet. That's about 17% oxygen. And so that's a significant hypoxic stress for most people. For me, not as much. I live in Colorado, so 5,500 feet where I live, go on a plane, 8,000 feet, not that big of a deal. But for somebody at sea level, that's a big hypoxic stress. And what Methylene Blue can do is actually, so low oxygen stress, it actually can compensate for that low oxygen level. It can decrease the inflammation that happens at being at that, at high altitude. It can improve the capacity for you to make energy even if there's less oxygen around, makes things more efficient. So it's really cool to use Methylene Blue when you travel, for example. So I use it a lot in that capacity for my patients and, and anybody that's coming to visit me here in Colorado. They, I try to get them to take some methyl blue before they start coming on the airplane and at least when they arrive and that kind of thing. So, so my long answer to your question is that all of us should have a base level of things that we take that are directed to what we need. Most of that's gonna be more of a long-term play. Some of it'll be short-term if it's an acute, like if, if it's a dysbiotic like gut, if it's things like that you're working on, that might be more short-term. You're not taking for 3 or 6 months. And then we have an additional layer of things that can help us now, like Methylene Blue. And I have other things that I work on downregulating the stress response. Like, I have— I work with a lot of patients because you're not going to heal your gut if you're always in fight or flight and always clamped down. And so we've got to calm down the nervous system. And I have a lot of things that I use there that can be very helpful, as well as lifestyle things that can be helpful And then there's, there's a bucket of the fun supplements you can try if you're like me and you like to try these things, like try something for 2 or 4 weeks and something that's on top of what you would take as a baseline. So that, that's, that's how I think about it in, in sort of the structure.

Okay. So do you think a healthy person who has good amounts of energy would even notice the difference if they were taking, I don't know, 4, 8, 12 milligrams of Methylene Blue?

They may, or they may not. You know, it may be one of the things where You're, if you're already well optimized, you're, you know, 6% of the US population that you feel good on a regular basis without any issues with energy, focus, detoxification, brain fog, you sleep well. It's probably unlikely you need to take Methylene Blue very often. You can probably take it when you're feeling like you're gonna have a bigger stressful day or like doing more endurance or going on an airplane. When you take it, you may feel a little bit better from like a mood perspective because Methylene Blue does increase serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. That is mild though. It's not something that's like at 4mg or 8mg. It's not going to be a huge bump for most people. Some people will be more sensitive to that than others, but most people, if you're relatively well optimized, you're probably not going to have a huge effect. At the higher doses, you will feel something because you're going to have those neurotransmitters floating around. You're going to have more energy capacity. So my estimation is that if you're pretty healthy overall, you're not going to need it all that often. And again, starting off at lower doses is almost always a good Good idea.

So then the kinds of conditions where doing something to improve mitochondrial function would be a game changer. Are we thinking like chronic fatigue? Yeah.

Yeah.

MCS.

So chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, long COVID, chronic viral infections, chronic mold, chronic Lyme. Even if you're directing a treatment, not at the virus and the bacteria or the, the, the bug itself, but just the mitochondrial support, it can go a long way way at making you feel better. Autoimmune issues as well. So any, any place where you've had a chronic condition for a while, especially you're depleting antioxidants, you're, you're depleting your capacity to make energy effectively over time. And so that's where methylene blue can really shine in there. I mean, of course you can use it at higher amounts as an anti-infective, as we said, but that's really the minority of cases in, in general.

So you described it when you were talking about the anti-infective properties as creating more reactive oxygen species and hydrogen peroxide and peroxyl radicals. So I'm wondering why that's beneficial.

Because that's how you kill bugs. That's how you kill infections.

Okay. But what's pulling those out then? Are you needing a supply of antioxidants from extra vitamins or?

Yeah. So if you're using it as an anti-infective, you're also gonna be bumping up your antioxidant support at the same time.

And you're not just canceling each other out.

Well, you wanna do them at separate times. Okay. Like you wanna do, you wanna, you, yeah, this is a good point. Well, you wanna, like, if you're doing an anti-infective protocol, you wanna do it in, in succession where you're doing your high-dose methylene blue and then 2 hours later you're giving your glutathione support, right? And your binders. And so that you're getting the, the oxidative load that's required to kill infection. That's how we kill most infections. Okay. We kill most infections by creating stress on the bug itself. And that stress is typically making the bug either starving it of its, of its fuel, which you can do, or you're actually directly pounding it with something that it can't tolerate. And that's usually reactive oxygen species, hydrogen peroxide, hydroxyl radicals, O3. So ozone, right? O3 is an anti-infective because it's killing bugs because it's reactive. Okay. And so these all have immunomodulatory effects, meaning that it increases your immune system function. It, it creates the stimulus to have you make more antioxidants, and And that's what's supposed to happen in quotes. But if you're already depleted in those things, that's why it's so important to support them at the same time with, you know, exogenous or external supplies of glutathione and alpha lipoic acid and vitamin C, et cetera, which, which are very important when you're using higher doses of anything that's gonna be anti-infective really.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Hydroxyl radicals, is that OH?

OH. Yeah.

And then hydrogen peroxide is H2O2. H2O2. Okay. Okay. And reaction, yeah. Reactive oxygen species are just, OH is a reactive oxygen species. Oh.

And also, um, it's auto oxygen that's either a singlet oxygen or a triplet oxygen is, is a, is a reactive oxygen species as well.

Okay. Yeah. Got it.

Yeah. Yeah.

So I know that Transcriptions products use a, a bit of an unusual form of delivery in troches. Is that how you say it?

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So I, I believe those are meant to be dissolved in the mouth, like under the tongue or in your cheek. Is that right? Right.

So we developed troches as a company because they're a great way to suspend an ingredient. So it keeps it so that it's always the same amount every single time. The major challenge with, with a lot of different deliveries, especially liquids, is it's very difficult to know exactly how much you're getting. And then with Methylene Blue specifically, Methylene Blue liquids, we tested a whole bunch out in the market and none of them meet their label claims for potency. So if it says it's 10 milligrams per dropper, it's probably 5 milligrams. You know, it's, it's about 50% on average potency compared to what it is. And the other thing about methylene blue is that it can be contaminated with heavy metals. So you have to be super careful about the quality you get. And so it can be contaminated with lead, mercury, arsenic, or cadmium, which are not things that most people want to have in their body, especially at any reasonable amount or any big amount. And so we, you know, we've done a lot of quality control over the years to make sure that we have the best stuff that we can out there. And Troche really make it easy for us to be able to do that. So in general, Troche, it's called a dissolvable, it's a dissolvable lozenge that usually would go between your upper cheek and gum and dissolve over about 15 to 30 minutes. Now, good news is that methylene blue is highly bioavailable, which means that most of what you take in orally, no matter if it's a buccal trochee or if you swallow it, is gonna get into circulation. About 90% bioavailability, which is quite high. Most supplements, for example, are much lower than that. Like an example that I like to give is one called NAC or N-A-C. That's about 10% bioavailable. So if you take 100 milligrams of NAC, you're only getting 10 milligrams in the body as opposed to you take whatever methylene blue dose you take, you get about 90% of that into the body, which is great, which is really nice. And so as a result of its bioavailability, you don't have to dissolve in your mouth. You can swallow it and get the same effects. And this is good because methylene blue is very, very blue. So if you dissolve methylene blue in your mouth, your mouth is going to be very blue depending on how much you take of methylene blue. The more blue your mouth is going to be. The only difference really is that buccal absorption and, you know, cheek absorption is faster. Faster. So people like cheek absorption because it's faster and they'll feel the effects faster, but they have the, you know, the downside of having a blue mouth in the process. So for most people, what we do recommend is just swallowing it on an empty stomach, and then you can eat about 20 to 30 minutes later to kind of push it through a little bit faster. And so that you metabolize a little bit faster, you're gonna feel the effects faster. And that's the ideal. Although I do have some patients and some colleagues actually that swear by using it in the mouth because they like how it makes them cognitively feel better faster. I have a friend, she's a practitioner in California. She has Bartonella, which is one of the chronic coinfections with Lyme. And when her Bartonella acts up, she gets brain fog. And so she knows that fastest thing to do is to put 8 milligrams of methylene blue in her mouth, and then the brain fog is going to go away in about 15 to 30 minutes. So that's an exception. I think for most people they can take Methylene Blue orally and just swallow on an empty stomach and get the same mitochondrial benefits, the same brain benefits. But just the minority of people will do better dissolving in their mouth. And we make the troches too, and they have a, it's scored, so it's got a line across in the middle. So you could take a quarter, a half, or three-quarters or full. So you can really titrate your dose and find the right one for you. And that's what I typically recommend is that you start off at a low dose, start off at a quarter, try it for about 3 days, and then if you don't feel much, then go to a half. Don't try and don't feel much, then go to, then go to 3/4 and go to a full. We also have a practitioner strength version called Tro Plus Blue, which is 50 milligrams, 5-0. We have a, a lower strength, which is 16. So a quarter of a 16 is gonna be 4 milligrams. So you have a spectrum of dosing. The Tro Plus is for practitioners only, so you have to work with a practitioner if you wanna be at the higher doses. But I like having a spectrum of dosing capacity because that's That's the best way I've found to kind of figure out where people are going to land and kind of go slowly up there. And the key with methylene blue to understand also is that it's not something that's building up in your body over 30 days or longer to see if you have an effect. Usually when you find the right dose, it's pretty obvious that you found the right dose. So you found the dose, you're like, oh, my brain fog is better, my pain is better, my inflammation feels better, my sleep scores are better. So we have people that take methylene blue in the in the morning, but then their sleep scores at night are dramatically better. Their HRV is better, their sleep is better. So you can have an effect even much later because you're supporting mitochondrial function, right? So I think that the key is understand that the dosing is very personalized and we allow that in the trochee form, which I appreciate as a clinician because even as a user of things like having a capsule that's one dose and you're too sensitive to that dose, what are you going to do with the capsule? You're going to break it open, you're going to try to pour half out.

It's a mess.

And then, you know, tablets trying to break them can be, be hard sometimes too. But as clinicians that, that run my company, myself and, and his name is Dr. Ted, like we're very much supervising all of the manufacturing, all the R&D, you know, making sure that like we're making the best stuff, you know, possibly as we use it in our patients, we use it personally with our family members, et cetera. And so the, the beginning titration would start like at 4 milligrams then, and then work up from Usually like either 4 or 8 milligrams, sometimes up to 12.5 milligrams as a starting dose depending on the person, but usually 8 milligrams is my starting dose. If somebody's super sensitive, 4 milligrams and then try it in the morning for about 3 days. If you feel great, you're sold. And then maybe you add a second dose if you need it in the end of like the early afternoon. If you're like, ah, I don't know if I feel much, then that's when you increase it. But what some people will feel, what's common to feel if you're relatively well optimized is that you should just feel this sort of energy rise. You just, just feel that your energy is just better throughout the day. It shouldn't hit you over the head like a stimulant. It should be like, oh, I just feel like I can just go for longer. And then you look back at your day and you're like, oh, I didn't get an energy dip in the middle of the day like I usually would. Or like my kids came into my room and yelled at me. I didn't yell back. That's interesting. You know what, what kept me from being so responsive, like so reactive, for example. So you often say it can be a little bit in the rearview mirror when you find the right dose, if you're relatively well optimized. But if you're coming from a place where you're, you know, you've been having challenges for a while, it shouldn't be subtle. You should pain better, mood better, brain performance, cognition better, brain fog better, attention better. Like you should notice these things, right? Like for somebody as well, relatively well optimized, it may not be as obvious, because you're already kind of starting at a, a different level.

Yeah. Hey, this is Lindsey here. Just letting you know that if you're tired of dealing with digestive issues like bloating, indigestion, soft stool, diarrhea, constipation, reflux, IBS, IBD, or the numerous health conditions that come about when your gut is off, like brain fog, weight gain, UTIs, fatigue, mental health issues, or complex conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. That's my specialty. With my 3 or 5 session gut health coaching packages, we'll discuss different stool and functional medicine tests to find out the root cause of your symptoms. I'll interpret the results and provide clear explanations, empowering you to make informed choices for your gut and overall health. And together we'll develop a customized action plan based on your test results so you can find relief and regain your health and vitality. I come from a functional medicine perspective, trying to incorporate the latest peer-reviewed research and educating you on protocols used by functional medicine practitioners. Practitioners, but devoting lots of time and support to my clients the way a doctor simply can't. If you're interested in a 3 or 5 session coaching package, you can sign up for complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session. Or if you can only afford one appointment at a time, you can book an initial 60-minute consultation. Links for those are in the show notes. Now back to the show. So I have mostly not dabbled in energy-related supplements cuz I have really good energy. That's never been an issue energy for me. Actually, that's not quite true. Sometimes, like, I, if you take me on like a hike uphill, I don't have good energy, but like for what I do for day-to-day operations, going to the gym and exercising, whatever. So I, I started taking NMN.

Okay.

Just like, I don't know, a week ago because I got a free bottle. So anyway, I went to the gym yesterday and I've been working over the course of multiple years to be able to do pull-ups cuz my whole family made fun of me because most women can't do pull-ups. Like that's, you know, anyway, so I went in there, I did 2 pull-ups. I've done that before. But anyway, then I went and did the, did the machine, you know, and I'm pulling 100. Normally I, I can, you know, I'm topping out around 5, 5 in each set, but I'm doing 6, no problem, both directions, you know, essentially 6 sets. So I'm just curious, like NMN versus methylene blue side by side.

So, so NMN, what it's doing is it increasing your NAD supply. Supply. NAD is one of the main electron carriers in your electron transport chain, which short story is that we need food. We eat food, specifically fat and carbohydrates, to get the electrons from our food and ship them over to our mitochondria to help make energy. And one of these electron carriers is called NAD, and when it has electrons, it's called NADH. When it doesn't, it's NAD+. And so the, the, as we get older, our ability to carry these electrons from our food gets worse. It just gets more sludgy. And, and there's a lot of different reasons. This could be inflammation. This is like enzymatic issues, like lots of different things. You, what you basically just did is give yourself a bigger supply of that NAD. And so as a result of that, you have more capacity to flip those electrons over to your electron transport chain and make more energy. Okay. Now what methylene blue can do, which is interesting, is it can synergize with that because it can help maintain electron flow and energy production while you have more capacity. Right. And the other thing it can do is actually it recycles that NAD+ back to its NAD+ supply. So you have more of it that's available as well. So it's synergistic, right? I would say that you, you could try one or the other and, and see if one had more of an effect than the other two. But I usually use them synergistically. Although I'm a little bit more wary of NAD+ supplements these days. I think NMN is probably a better choice than NAD+ directly. We don't have a lot of evidence that NAD+ gets directly into the cell, people taking NAD+ IVs and things like that. I think it's probably misguided. And I think there's also some worry that some of us have now in the longevity community that too much NAD+ supply is also likely potentially dangerous because also NAD+ is what runs cancer cells too. And that's why there's some controversy around just taking NAD+ without taking something else that's going to make sure that NAD+ doesn't go to particular pathways and it gets into biochemistry. But anyway, short story The theory is that they're synergistic.

Okay. Got it. So we talked a bit on the introductory call about SIBO and you were elaborating on your view of what's going on underneath the diagnosis related to oxygen. So can you talk a little bit about, a little bit about that?

Sure. Yeah. So what we do think is that, you know, most of the, the bugs that are involved in small intestine bacterial overgrowth are anaerobic bugs, which were bugs that do not like high oxygen environments.. So there's some question as to whether if you can flood the system with more oxygen, if you could potentially have a regressive effect or a, you know, decrease the amount of the bugs that are available. So in the world of hyperbaric oxygen therapy that I've been in for many, many years, there's been some case reports of looking at using hyperbaric therapy as an adjunctive treatment for SIBO infections. And seen with some positive benefit. And like, I've seen this also in people with, with Crohn's disease, with ulcerative colitis, just inflammatory bowel disease of NOS. Like, they've, I've seen benefits using hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And I think one of the reasons why is because it has this effect on anaerobic bugs that tend to be the ones that, that grow more preferentially in more pathogenic states. There's also the potential that what hyperbaric therapies do is increasing stem cell growth and stem cell mobilization in in the gut, which is helpful for regrowth and repopulation and the gut lining itself. So I think that's also a part of it as well. So I think those are some things that I think about when it comes to SIBO. I mean, the big thing for me these days, Lindsey, I know, I think you and I talked about this briefly on our intro call, was just sympathetic activation in general. Like, in the sense of if somebody's in fight or flight all the time, they're chronically stressed, chronically overactivated nervous system, they can't ever get into the rest, digest, detoxification. There's no amount of hyperbaric therapy, there's no amount of methylene blue really that I'm going to give them, at least and at least in my experience, that's gonna help them long-term because they're never really gonna be able to fully detoxify, fully, you know, recover gastrointestinal function without being able to be in parasympathetic mode more of the time. And so that's been a big focus of mine. When I first got into hyperbaric therapy, I put people in the chamber, like, why aren't I not getting better? You know, first I started with my health optimization practice. Why are people not getting better? I'm giving them the right supplements, but if they're always like clamped down and always in that fight or flight, if you're always in that state, and many of you don't even know that you're in that, which is the hard part because like you've been compensating for such a long time at this level and don't realize that there is like a, like a base level that you've not been in for a long period of time. But once we can acknowledge that we're there, bring it down, that's when we can start healing. And I think that's been a big, big push of mine recently. And giving mitochondrial support at the same time is very important. You know, like methylene blue could be very helpful here, but it's not gonna be the only lever. And that's why we're like leveraging the the GABA system, really, really important, you know, looking at various supplements you can use maybe, but really the big things are lifestyle. If you're living in a room with a partner that's snoring all the time, get out of that room or get them a sleep apnea machine. If you're in a toxic environment where, you know, you're stressed all day because your boss is yelling at you, like find another job if you can. Right. These are really important. And that's, that's where I've been gravitating towards a lot lately is like, don't forget this, the proverbial proverbial elephant in the room.

I laughed because I was living in a boat with my husband who was snoring all the time and he refused to do a sleep apnea test. So I made him get a mouth thing that brings the jaw out and wear tape across his mouth every night. And that has solved the problem. So if anybody else is in the same situation, that works very well.

That's good to hear. I'm glad you figured that out.

Yeah. So back to the whole oxygen question. And so I actually think of, of most of the cases of dysbiosis that I see as the opposite of what you described, where the facultative anaerobes, in particular the proteobacteria, are overgrown. High E. coli, Enterobacter.

Oh, the facultative ones. Yeah. Yeah. So the, the fact that anaerobes, they typically, they can thrive in oxygen-rich conditions, but they don't thrive in high oxygen conditions. So Lyme is also a facultative anaerobe as an example. So this is why it's important. The dosing of oxygen's important where like a little bit of oxygen might not be a good idea, but a lot of oxygen is doing what we talked about earlier, which is causing reactive oxygen species. It's causing oxidative stress. And as a result of that, it's, it's actually stressing those facultative anaerobes as well.

Got it. Got it.

Okay.

Thanks for the clarification.

Yeah, no problem. Yeah, that's a good question.

So you were talking about obviously getting outta fight or flight mode and of course lifestyle is the biggest piece of the puzzle. Yes. I often look at adrenal tests. There's the old methods, I don't know, old, whatever, of they're low, low DHEA, high cortisol, whatever. You might be using pregnenolone or DHEA or, or old like ashwagandha and sure. What are those? The, the, the forgetting the word for the whole family of the adaptogens. Adaptogens. Thank you.

Yeah.

Right. Are you looking beyond something like that? That, or are there particular things that you're thinking of in within that family that, that you like?

Yeah. I mean, I think that those are good, but it's really leveraging the GABA system. So the GABA is our neurotransmitter at our brain that's supposed to calm down the firing of our neurons. And it's like the brakes of our brain. Glutamate is our primary excitatory neurotransmitter. That's like your gas pedal and glutamate and GABA are always supposed to be in balance. Glutamate gets converted into GABA in the brain. You have your other superstar neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, et cetera. That— those are only 20% of the brain's neurotransmission. 80% of it is glutamate and GABA. So the key to understand is if you're GABA deficient, you don't have enough GABA around, you have more stress, anxiety, you have more depression, you can't sleep, you have more tremors, you feel like you're just irritable and sort of on edge all the time. And so if you can leverage the GABA system. That's another really great way to start downregulating that parasympathetic nervous system to go back more parasympathetic. But you can't take GABA supplements. And I think, I'm not sure if we talked about this in the, in the call earlier, but whenever, but the GABA itself is too big of a molecule to get into the brain. If it does get into the brain, it means your blood-brain barrier is not optimized, meaning that you're getting, allowing things through that are leaking through. And this is a a great approximation for a leaky gut. If you have a leaky gut, you almost always have a leaky brain that goes along with it. Not always, but it does happen. And so if you take GABA supplements and they work for you, it's because your brain is not doing what it's supposed to do and keeping things out.

Yeah. I've rarely seen GABA be helpful to anybody when I've offered that for sleep help and such.

Yeah. So what's interesting, I've had the experience where I've had people come to me and GABA supplements are working for them, but then we heal up their gut and they're, and the GABA supplements stop working. And That's actually quite diagnostic, as you could imagine. So I use things that enhance the GABA receptor in other ways. But before I get to that, what I don't use is alcohol or benzos, benzodiazepines like Ativan, Valium, and Xanax, and sleep drugs, because those all work on the GABA receptor. Okay. But the problem with all those is that tolerance, dependence, withdrawal, all the things that are not great because they bind very tightly to the GABA receptor. So I use things like GABA, CBD, CBG. Ashwagandha is a good one. I use another one called Agrin, which comes from a psychedelic mushroom, but it's not psychedelic at low doses. The amanita mushroom, it's long acting. You can use it for sleep. Hanakyl, Hanakyl from magnolia bark is good. There's also dihydrohanakyl beta, which is the more active version of Hanakyl. So I use all of those to enhance the GABA system. The key is that you want to supply the system with GABA if you can, but using things that work just like GABA. And so Agrin does is one of those. It works just like GABA binds to where GABA would bind. Another one called nicotinyl GABA or vitamin B3 GABA. Vitamin B3 has a transporter that gets across into the brain, takes the GABA with it, then it breaks up into B3 and GABA, gives you the niacin, NAD+. So you don't feel tired when you take it, which is nice because NAD+ is a little bit activating. So I use things that, you know, that can activate the GABA receptor without causing tolerance, withdrawal, dependence. And it hopefully for just a short period of time, as people get a sense of, oh, this is what it feels like to have a nervous system that's calming down. Like once you can get that experience, then, then it becomes a lot easier to get back there with breathwork, with yoga, with mindfulness training, with warm baths at night, sauna, you know, things like that.

So, so are those supplements that are offered through Transcriptions, the ones you were mentioning, or, oh, some of them are.

Yeah. So we have one called Tro Calm, which is great for anxiousness and stress. It has kava, CBD, CBG, which are both non-psychoactive cannabinoids, something called B3 GABA, which is that one that helps with relaxation, GABAergic tone, but doesn't make you feel tired because it has some B3 in there too. That's great for taking during the day. You take a quarter, half, or full depending on what you need. It's really great to kind of take that edge off and also to quiet your mind and, you know, as a, as a great way to kind of relax after a long day, you know, at the office or with kids. And instead of taking out that glass of wine when everybody goes to sleep, you take out some Tro Calm. It's a nice way to kind of wind down. There's something called Tro Z, which has 8 different ingredients in it that comprehensively support sleep. But the 1-2 combo there for the GABA side is honokiol and agarin, which I mentioned earlier, which work on that GABA receptor really well. It also has 5-HTP, melatonin, CBD, CBN, and things that work on something called the adenosine system, which is another neurotransmitter in our brain, helps us feel tired and give us the drive to get down to bed too. So very comprehensive. And so, yeah, but ashwagandha, Ashwagandha, rhodiola, lemon balm, and then other cannabinoids, non-psychoactive cannabinoids, can also be helpful as well to bind to the GABA receptor and also the endocannabinoid system, which is another balancing system in our brain. So I use all those things depending on the person. Valerian root, by the way, that valerian is also another common one that works in the GABA system too. So those are just awesome options for people. But yeah, in my practice, I do a lot with anxiety and sleep, you know, because I think if you can get sleep better, everything else is going to get better. If you can get anxiety better. You're likely gonna have a better functioning human. And then it's important to support mitochondria along the way.

Yeah. Okay. Well, we have run out of time, but I did wanna ask if people want to get things through Transcriptions, can we set up an affiliate account for me?

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Easy to do.

Okay, great. Well, we'll put that link in the show notes then. Okay.

My pleasure.

Awesome. Anything you wanna share before we get off about where, where to find you and, and all that?

Well, thank you for having me, Lindsey Parsons. This has been fun. I think the easiest For the company, it's Troscriptions, T-R script, scriptions, like prescriptions with a T-R-O in front of it. So troscriptions.com, you can check it out. You check us out on, you know, on the socials and things like that too. Personally, for me, it's drscottsher.com. My website is my name, D-R-S-C-O-T-T-S-H-E-R-R. You can find out more about my companies, my consulting. I have my own health optimization practice where I work with people. Troscriptions, we have a nonprofit organization. Health Optimization Associated. Actually, that's where everything started. It's at homehope.org. Health Optimization Medicine and Practice is the name of the nonprofit. That's my clinical practice framework as well.

Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for sharing all this great information with us.

Well, thank you for having me. It's been fun.

So there's something about the blue color of methylene blue that's always been off-putting to me sort of because of like, you know, food dyes and all that. Not that I really knew what to take it for prior to this, but now I'm curious and Scott said he'd send me some. So I'm gonna give it a try and I will report back in my newsletter, which you can subscribe to on my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com. I have started a behind the mic section in the newsletter about my life and my gut health. So if you're curious about that, it comes out every 2 weeks. You can support the podcast by buying supplements at a discount from my FullScript Dispensary, ordering tests at a discount from my Rupa Health Lab store, or using my affiliate links to iHerb, which is available worldwide, or Amazon. And just a note that you can use my Amazon link to buy anything. So I'd appreciate it if you'd bookmark my link and use it not just for supplements, but for gifts and everyday items to support the podcast.

Cast.

If you'd like to connect with me online, you can follow my High Desert Health Facebook page, join my gut healing Facebook group, or join my newsletter list at highdeserthealthcoaching.com, as well as follow me on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and X. Links for those are in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today. I'm usually wishing you all the perfect stool.