this is the real Health podcast brought to you by Reardon Clinic our mission is to bring you the latest information and top experts in functional and integrative medicine to help you make informed decisions on your path to real health welcome everyone to another episode of the real Health podcast this is Dr Ron hunting hockey and I'm your chief medical officer here at the Reardon clinic and we are excited once again welcome back Dr Thomas Levy who is one of the foremost experts in redox medicine and today we're going to be talking about methylene blue again because three months ago we uh we did a show on methylene blue the antioxidant power methylene blue and since that time there have been 2 589 views with over 392 comments made so Dr Levy I think we created quite a stir there what what what's the deal what's why is there so much interest in methylene blue and what can we do to tell the audience more because it sounds like they're really interested in what this can do for them well I think it's probably because it's methylene blue a Dye which is kind of quirky if you will at the outset and sort of immediately begs for a little attention how is it that some sort of dye is something that's useful and then of course after you get all above the surface there and get into the substance of it you realize it's just an incredibly dynamic therapy and as we've discussed and not all antioxidants have this property I might add an antioxidant is not an antioxidant it's not an antioxidant but methylene blue in many ways uh parallels the activities of vitamin C in the body and what it does and the effects that it has on increased oxidative stress inside uh cells and oxidized biomolecules and along with some unique and increased activity over vitamin C when it comes to problems with the central nervous system let me just read here it's been looked upon as a nootropic which that is something that helps the brain improved mood improved energy enhanced cognitive function uh a greater sense of well-being it's safe and as you mentioned it's a very powerful antioxidant and it seems to work a lot in the central nervous system so what is it that makes it different from vitamin C that makes it so uh useful in terms of cognitive functions well as we just mentioned it is a powerful antioxidant and generally speaking for any condition that you want to get effective clinical outcomes you want to have a way of delivery whether it's vitamin C or anything else a very powerful antioxidant effect in the tissue that's involved so with that in mind it turns out the methylene blue has fat soluble characteristics it has water-soluble characteristics it's not that large a molecule and it very very rapidly gets taken up into the cells throughout the body and some of the literature says that it gets up to a hundred fold more concentrated uh inside the central nervous system than the rest of the body only an hour after Administration so it really likes the central nervous system and early on it was discovered by a number of people who worked with it including Dr Paul earlick a Nobel Prize winner was that uh wow some people who were depressed just just started losing their depression after they took methylene blue now mind you they didn't go straight to giving people that they did a lot of animal research before it ever occurred to them to do something as crazy as give a die as some sort of therapeutic agent but um you know the Die part is also beneficial in a lot of different applications because of two things as I said is well absorbed and number three and number two the the die track thing so it when surgeons have used this for a long time and showing exactly where Cancers and other processes have infiltrated because they put a little methylene blue on the area and it immediately gets taken up along the tracks of lymphatic vessels and other extracellular areas so it allows surges to very well demarcate exactly where a conditioned tumor whatever is that they want to that they want to cut out but as it turns out and we can go into this in a little bit uh probably the single most important characteristic of methylene blue is that it rejuvenates mitochondria and if you rejuvenate mitochondria in the brain magic starts to happen people with neurological disorders that are felt to be irreversible are not irreversible it just turns out they're irreversible when traditional methods of treatment are used to treat them you know there's a if if all you do is concentrate on trying to suppress or minimize a symptom while really doing absolutely nothing in your Primary Therapy to stop the ongoing new damage and reverse the old damage of whatever process you're looking at of course as many diseases will be deemed incurable but when he begin to understand the pathology understand the importance of what you mentioned redox biology where we finally start to get the reduction which is the electron replete in the electron sedus side of redox more prominent inside a cell than the electron depleted oxidized cell when you start to have more reduced biomolecules that oxidize biomolecules then incredible things start to happen I think if I just take a moment here and it can explain to the audience how I make my own methylene blue solution to tape because that was a number of the comments where now how do you make this stuff what's the best way to take it there's a lot of different ways but I think this particular way elucidates what you just said you know if you want to make yourself a a methylene blue drink what you do what I do is take some warm water warm or hot water and I put ascorbic acid in the water maybe a half of a teaspoon and then I'll take my pharmaceutical grade methylene blue drops that are available off the internet and I'll put I'll put 20 drops in which is 10 milligrams of methylene blue interestingly enough as it drips in it's dark Inky blue for so you have to be careful how you handle methylene blue because it can really stain stuff it's dark and Inky but it starts to react with the vitamin C water and it turns into leukoc methylene blue which is a kind of a lot very light kind of blue or turquoise color and it's fascinating to see the color colorometric change that occurs now Dr Levy why is that important to have a methylene blue that now owns an extra electron what does that do to help the cell function better especially cells in the brain well it does twofold things in becoming reduced it oxidized some of the ascorbic acid that was in that solution which means part of the ascorbic acid is now dhaa dehydro ascorpic acid and it just turns out Serendipity science whatever that ascorbic acid straight up is very poorly if at all taken up inside the brain as is instead it's the oxidized form DHA which goes rapidly across the blood-brain barrier and uses the glute Transporters which is the same transporter that's used for glucose it is facilitated facilitated by insulin the same way to get inside the cell this then allows a much greater amount percent of the vitamin C to be readily taken into the brain now now having said all of that you still have and this is something that I've really come to my realization fairly recently but I think it's very important I mean all my professional life for at least the last 30 years has been focused on the fact that vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant because it donates electrons that's not so true that that's what makes it a powerful antioxidant many many many molecules will donate an electron but they don't participate in the rapid to and fro give up an electron take an electron give out an electron take an electron in the case of vitamin C this is why it's not so important whether you take it ironically enough and it reduces oxidized form it's just important that you continue to expand the Matrix of vitamin C and other antioxidant molecules in the body so that the electrons already present in the system have a great facility in being easily distributed throughout the cytoplasm and throughout the organelles because literally it's weather electrons get where they need to go inadequate amounts in time that determine health and just to mention something we already talked about in the past but it's important to realize is when electrons flow that's called current okay so if you have enough antioxidants like vitamin C that not only will donate electron but will rapidly take the electron back in its when it's after it's been oxidized this actually generates the flow of electrons gives you micro carrots and generates uh voltage potentials across the cell and there's many articles in the literature they clearly show that certain degrees of current and certain degrees of voltage are clear markers of whether a cell is healthy or not so basically when people would take the methylene blue in this manner you're going to facilitate its entry into the central nervous system and I ran into a shocking amazing statistic I used to tell people that a neuron contains uh about a hundred thousand mitochondria one neuron the new thinking is that it's anywhere from one to two million mitochondria so if you can get electrons via vitamin C and methylene blue into your central nervous system that's going to help what some days to me feels like the dead battery syndrome those days when my brain just is not working but this is a good way to rejuvenate it and there is research now in terms of uh Alzheimer's and other Central Parkinson's other central nervous system diseases responding to this therapy though it's not a well-known therapy and conventional thinking and you know they have something called the orac value which is basically how quickly and completely an antioxidant gives up this electron but it does not measure in any degree at all how readily it takes it back which is why you have some of these antioxidants oh astaxanthin and other that are so powerful but they don't get where you want them to get in the body so it's important that you have that power plus the ability to be to do to be distributed and the one really super thing that makes methylene blue unique above and beyond vitamin C it's almost slander for somebody like me to say that right above and beyond What vitamin C can do is that it rapidly gets taken up not only inside the cells but specifically inside the mitochondria so it's selectively accumulates inside the mitochondria now what does it do when it's there well whether it's in its reduced form or its oxidized form when it finally gets there either way this is what happens if it's in its reduced form it bypasses the entire electron chain transfer a series of complexes and donates this electron to the final one that allows the development of uh protons that that fuel the ATP synthase pump and you make a lot of ATP without all the stuff ahead of it why is that significant well in going through the entire electron transport chain not only are you trying to get that electron down to that final spot where it needs to be you're generating more oxidative stress in the process and this is what pretty much causes mitochondrial dysfunction is things slow down you start to generate too much oxidative stress relative to the amount of energy that you generate and then it's a vicious cycle and things slow down and shut down the methylene blue goes straight to the end of it and allows you to make ATP without generating oxygenated stress on the other hand if the when the when the methylene blue comes into the oxidized state it goes to the first complex where there's a lot of what's called nadh in the nadh instead of well directly give the electron to the methylene blue and then it'll go to the other end of the train do the same thing that I just mentioned to generate ATP so even without needing or having to understand biochemistry at all in a nutshell methylene blue makes mitochondria which are the powerhouses of your cells which means to the powerhouses of your body right makes mitochondria much more efficient in making energy and much more efficient in generating less oxidative stress in the process of generating that energy it's pretty cool uh just for our general audience you know in terms of dosage I had we had a number of questions and comments about dosing uh and are there in for well first of all are there any any contraindications to using methylene blue isn't the phenol isn't it the antidepressants theoretically could be a problem and you may have to uh start really low in that case well they talk about the people who take the SSRI antidepressants even then it doesn't appear inevitable that methylene blue is going to give you problems it's just that under those circumstances you should probably work with an aware integrated physician and maybe start at a low dose while at the same time tapering off of some of those drugs but certainly if you're on the SSRI you shouldn't just straight out of the gate take a large amount of ethylene blue because that could cause substantial problems yeah and there are a number of the psychiatrists now Dr Christopher Plummer has written a book called brain energy where he's making he's a Harvard psychiatrist researcher making the assertion that maybe all uh of your mental illnesses may turn out to be metabolic namely lack of energy and this is where the methylene blue story comes in so people could easily I would think start with maybe five or ten drops and make you make the vitamin C solution and it has to be ascorbic acid if you use sodium ascorbate you're not going to get the electron donor to the uh to the methylene blue so it has to be ascorbic acids a quarter to a half a teaspoon in some warm water Stir It Up with the methylene blue and then you can drink it and it does not it doesn't dye your tongue and so and it's very well tolerated what would you say once or twice a day uh I don't know what the half-life is of the half-life is significant I don't think you need to dose it more than once a day unless you're treating a condition you're dealing with an infection we talked about in the past how effective methylene blue was amazingly as a monotherapy and bringing people out of advanced uh Advanced septic shock with coven on the ventilator without vasopressors and even after having coded and brought back so and so if you're dealing with an earlier stage a cold or flu or something along those lines then you want to you want to consider dosing it several times a day the dosage range generally speaking and I got to emphasize generally okay is something along the lines of uh 0.5 milligram per kilogram body weight up to maybe two milligrams per kilogram body weight now what does that translate to well if you're a 150 pound person that's 70 kilograms so two milligram per kilogram that's uh 300 milligrams that would be your top dose whereas your low dose you're not really feeling poorly you just want to keep things running well then you might want to go with the 5 or 10 or 15 milligrams which would be you know 10 10 to 20 drops of the of the methylene blue so all of that determines how you go after that and and then like everything else right people just like they do with vitamin C they develop their own their own health intuition they they notice many people just like with vitamin C after they take a little methylene blue they they feel better in a way that they can't quite put their finger on but they know where they're feeling better and they know when that's not there and so people just are able to adjust it with based on how they feel but but basically if you don't go crazy on the dosage and uh don't exceed 100 150 200 milligrams especially if you're dealing with an infection there's very very little toxicity it's been around a long time yeah since I think over a hundred years right so it's always a good idea to try to develop a relationship with a knowledgeable person I have one of the comments was that that the person mentioned it to their nephrologist and he says that's crazy that's crazy well if you don't know anything about it it's it sure would sound kind of crazy but if you use small doses working up gradually and and also understanding the fact that Rome is not built in a day and if you've got early stage or mid-stage Alzheimer's it's not going to make you well in a short period of time there's going to be a a process of healing that needs to go on and should be coordinated I think with someone knowledgeable in the field of uh supplements and and uh and functional type medicine so but anyway Dr Levy this is fascinating and I think this is not the end of the story I think more people are gonna want to know more about about it because it in a way it highlights what you've been saying for so many years is that antioxidants still play a crucial role have always played a crucial role in not only regaining Health but maintaining Optimal Health and so once again I want to thank you for the work you've done for all these years and the work you're still doing with uh with the books you're writing and the hope you're giving to people as they look for ways to deal with their chronic illness thank you so much well thank you Dr Ron I appreciate that sir all right we'll be back sometime in the future everyone take care thank you for listening to the real Health podcast if you enjoy this episode be sure to subscribe and leave us a review you can also find all of the episodes and show notes over at realhealthpodcast.org also be sure to visit reardonclinic.org where you will find hundreds of videos and articles to help you create your own version of real health [Music]