Dr. A, a naturopathic clinician with 30 years' experience, explains how methylene blue works in your body: it boosts mitochondrial energy production, fights infections, and may protect kidneys from chemotherapy damage through NRF2 activation. Clinical uses include chronic fatigue, long COVID, neurological support, and post-surgical recovery.
Methylene blue. You ever wonder what it does to your body? Let's break that down. Hey, I'm Dr. A. I use this channel to answer questions that people have, both from the clinical part of my life and the online part of my life. I've been involved in teaching and research in naturopathic and integrative medicine for over 30 years. Been seeing patients for a very long time, and I use that background to answer these questions. So first thing I want to say is, if you want other perspectives on methylene blue beyond what we're talking about here, is that A ton of methylene blue content on the channel, so just go over there and take a look. But the first thing to think of is what is methylene blue's major target? Now, it might do other things, but its major target is your mitochondria, which you hear called the powerhouse of the cell. That's because they make the energy. They help form ATP, the basic energy unit that your body uses in the cells. And so if I do something to speed up the mitochondria, I might speed up the energy formation, you know, apparatus in the body. So the mitochondria are a main target of it, not the only target, but a main target. There are some other targets where methylene blue may have a role as an anti-infective agent. It certainly has a role in different phases of detoxification in the body, and that's some of its uses in emergency medicine revolve around that. And then something that we're seeing in more recent research is gene repair through helping damaged cells in especially sensitive tissues like the repair after an insult. Now, the research I'm thinking of is about the insult of chemotherapy on the kidneys, which is always an issue if you're getting chemotherapy. How much can your kidneys handle? But there's actually research now to show that there's mechanistic ways that methylene blue can help to turn around the damage that's going on in the kidneys. So when we think of the big target and mitochondrial boosting, what's that going to help me with if I'm using methylene blue as an intervention, et cetera? So the first thing you might be recommended methylene blue for would be recovery of energy, chronic fatiguing problems, et cetera. We see it used a lot nowadays in long COVID and fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue patients. We also see it in people after surgery for recovery, et cetera. As mentioned, there's also other recovery benefits. So we might have improved overall healing. It may help because of its redox ability, oxidation reduction, which interacts with your antioxidant systems in supporting your immune function, immune cell support, immune chemistry support, et cetera. But generally overall improved healing. There are times when it's used in the hospital during neurological surgery, for example, to help protect the brain and help with the healing process after a neurological surgery and other things as well. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you 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 see you over there. Thanks. Also in the department of the brain, because your brain has lots of mitochondria also, there's the support of neurological function, support of memory. There are research that are both newer and older looking at methylene blue use in people with Parkinson's disease, people with different types of dementia, people with other neurological conditions where methylene blue has been used as an intervention to help with their brain function. Another area that's very highly metabolic and needs all the support it can through the mitochondrial pathways and also the redox and detoxification pathways is going to be your liver. So it may be supportive to your liver doing the job of getting the junk moved out of you. So your liver is another area that can be supported. Then there would be recovery and repair for your physical body, muscle, connective tissue, etc. Maybe you're recovering from, you know, kicking up your, you know, workouts and you're sore all over, you've kind of hurt yourself, or maybe you're recovering from orthopedic surgery or something like that. It can be used in that setting as well. And then I didn't want to leave out one of the other really non-directly mitochondrial benefits that I mentioned earlier, and that's genetic repair after a toxic insult. So we mentioned chemotherapy damage in the kidney. Methylene blue works through a system that has another kind of commonly talked about intermediate called NRF2, or NRF2. And so methylene blue, it turns out, interacts with the NRF2 system when we injure a sensitive cell like the kidney cells to help block the genomic damage that, say, a chemotherapy agent might do to the kidney cells. And of course, if we're going to use any drug but a drug like chemotherapy, we would like to use it without it killing our kidneys. So methylene blue might be used in the future as a way to protect the kidneys from gene damage. Now, it's going to protect other tissues as well. It's Just the kidneys are one of the more sensitive tissues that can get burned out by certain types of chemotherapy. So that's why they're researching it there. All right. Well, I'm Dr. A. Thank you for listening. I wanna thank you all of the people who are subscribing. Thank you to the community. Like, share, comment, subscribe, all the cool things. Really appreciate it. And check out these other videos we're gonna show you here at the end. We got a lot of content now on the channel. See you next time.
