Dr. A, an integrative physician with 30+ years of experience, explains methylene blue from its history as the oldest synthetic drug to modern uses. It's FDA-approved for methemoglobinemia and surgical tracing, but practitioners use low doses off-label for mitochondrial support in chronic fatigue and long COVID. Oral doses range from 5-100 mg, and quality matters: industrial-grade risks heavy-metal contamination, while USP-grade is safer.
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So YouTube family, you've had questions about the basics of methylene blue because we've done lots of content on the big picture of what it does and the small picture. Let's get into methylene blue 101 on the channel today. Hey, I'm Dr. A. Thanks for listening. I use this channel to answer questions. I've been involved in teaching and research in the integrative and naturopathic medical communities for 30-plus years at this point. Been practicing a long time seeing patients, and this is what we do here is just answer questions you have. So the first thing is, what is it? Methylene blue is considered to be the oldest synthetic drug in at least modern human history. Now, there's a lot of human history and about other drugs that we don't know about from past times, but in modern times, over 300 years of use of methylene blue as a synthetic drug. It's got blue in its name. It's a dye. And so it's used for all sorts of things that are non-medical, but also in medicine, it is commonly used for things like particular metabolic toxicities. If you have your hemoglobin doing something it's not supposed to and it's not wanting to bind with oxygen, you're in the emergency room, they may give you intravenous methylene blue to help undo that particular problem. It's sometimes used in surgery again as a tracer dye. It's also used in surgery, especially neurological surgery, to help protect the nervous system during and after neurological surgical procedures. So it's used that way. And it's also gained a following in the last, you know, number of years. It's been around for over 300 years. It's gained a following for non-toxology, non-surgery use at lower doses. And what does that do? It basically helps to support your mitochondrial function. So your mitochondria are what make energy. The core part of the functional unit of the mitochondria is oxidative phosphorylation. So this is what like NAD triggers and other B vitamins and other cool things that make energy in your mitochondria. Well, it turns out methylene blue goes in kind of on the side of the Oxfos cascade and jumpstarts the cascade. So it triggers more energy production. So people will use it for, you know, non-hospital uses at lower doses for anything where your mitochondria might need some support. The things to keep in mind with mitochondrial support are the mitochondria are numerous inside your cells and different cell types have different concentrations of mitochondria. So like your brain and your heart have lots, your reproductive organs have lots, things like your digestive organs and your liver and your muscles have, you know, medium amount. It just depends on the energy requirement for those cells. So if I'm having, you know, chronic fatigue or long COVID, or I'm having trouble healing up after surgery or some other thing, sometimes, you know, a practitioner might give you methylene blue as a support for that, for example. So that'd be an example of like a non-hospital use, non-toxicology use. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. So we'll see you over there. Thanks. Now, it can be taken orally. I mentioned in the hospital it's usually given intravenously at higher doses. At lower doses, it can be taken orally, and those dose ranges are all over the map because everyone's different. So you could see people reacting to 5 or 10 milligrams orally and people not reacting until they get to 50 to 100 milligrams. But when you think about taking it, we also want to consider what might some side effects be so that we stay safe with it. Now, the first thing is I think if you're going to take anything like methylene blue, it's not part of your body. It's really a drug that is also sold as a supplement. You should probably be working with somebody who is a practitioner that knows how to manage these things because you can get too much and get overstimulated. But that being said, the side effects are either due to the nature of the chemistry, which is it is a dye, and/or the nature of its interaction with your mitochondria. So methylene blue will, if you take it orally, like as a tincture or pill or something, it might turn your teeth blue because it's blue. That will come off when you brush your teeth. But think about it, there's a dye going through your body, you're going to urinate it out, and so your urine will become discolored and you may have toilet color problems that need to be cleaned as you go along. The one thing with medical testing you have to keep in mind is this is going through your digestive tract into your blood plasma, and then all the way through into your urine to be excreted. So if you're doing a urine test especially, but some blood tests, and you can be off of your methylene blue, it would be really good not to be taking methylene blue and trying to get a urine test done because you can throw off some of the urine tests. Usually one day away from the methylene blue before you do urine test is fine. 2 days would be even better. But let's say you're in the emergency room or something and you don't have the option. Just if they're going to take blood or urine tests, tell them that you're taking oral methylene blue. And just so they know, if the labs look weird, that might be why. Other side effects though would be metabolic. So let's say you take too much methylene blue, you can feel very overcaffeinated, shaky, can't sleep, maybe anxious, other stuff. That's just your mitochondria running a little too fast on that day. Now in other content, we got a ton of other information about quality concerns. And because there's so much content that we've already done on this, I'm just going to remind everyone that you can have a chemical like methylene blue that has one name, but there's different grades of methylene blue and quality across the board. So on one end, you might have commercial or industrial methylene blue, which is made as a dye industrially. Then you might move over a little more pure, have reagent-grade methylene blue that we would use in a laboratory setting. And then you move over to USP grade, which is the United States Pharmacopeia, which would be the kind we would use for human use as a medicine. So what you don't want is to be taking something that's not USP grade as a human, as a supplement or medicine. Why? Because methylene blue at these lower grades often has a lot of heavy metals in it. I spoke to a pharmacy that makes methylene blue and we use them all the time, and they say they will get 3 batches of raw material of methylene blue that is USP grade, and 2 will fail for heavy metals before they get 1 batch that they can use. So because heavy metals are mitochondrial poisons, we don't want to be taking a supplement or a drug for mitochondrial use and then have it full of heavy metals, right? So you want to make sure if you're getting it from a pharmacy, they're doing QC on the metals. If you're buying it as a supplement, they should be very transparent on their website or somewhere and have quality control information that you can look— you can look up the PDF to see how they test it for heavy metals. So just keep the quality in mind. Know that we want to start with the USP, the pharmaceutical grade, not reagent grade, not industrial grade. And then we want to make sure somebody has tested that for heavy metals. All right, thanks for the questions about methylene blue. This was Methylene Blue 101, and There's a ton of other methylene blue and mitochondrial content on the channel. Really appreciate all you subscribers and all the growing community. If you can, please do subscribe, like, share, all of the good things, and we'll be back with the next video. But check out these other videos we're going to suggest here at the end too. Thanks.
