#436 Is Methylene Blue the Magic Bullet for Health? - Dr Scott Sherr

Dr. Scott Sherr (0:00)

So if you get poisoned with cyanide, you destroy your Complex IV on the mitochondria. And if you have destruction of Complex IV, you will die, most likely. But what Methylene Blue does, it can compensate for Complex IV destruction by maintaining some energy production, even in that state, which is a very challenging state. So it has the capacity for you to make energy, so increase ATP production, and at the same time, it also works as this other aspect, the redox cycler, is it can act directly as an antioxidant.

Siim Land (0:32)

Scott, welcome back to the show.

Dr. Scott Sherr (0:35)

It's good to see you, Siim. It's been a minute.

Siim Land (0:38)

Well, it's been five years, which is a long minute. Yeah, like last time I had you on a podcast, we talked about hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and it's been quite a while since we had a discussion. Today, I wanted to bring you on to talk about Methylene Blue, because you're also an expert on that, and I've seen it become quite popular over the last year or two on social media that different people are talking about. It's called Magic Bullet, and a very powerful supplement for different things. So yeah, we can have a deep dive into all things in Methylene Blue and how does it work. So yeah, maybe we can start with what is Methylene Blue, and there's also these headlines that it's this fish tank cleaner. So yeah, what is it?

Dr. Scott Sherr (1:26)

Yeah, so I mean, there's so much to unpack here with Methylene Blue, but you did mention something about a magic bullet. And actually, Methylene Blue was actually discovered back in the 1870s, a textile dye, before it became a medical compound used in treatment for infection, which we'll talk about. It got a name of what we actually called the magic bullet. And the reason for that is because you could get very high doses of Methylene Blue to somebody, and it would kill pathogens, but it would not kill normal cells. And as a result of that, and that's kind of like the... This is before chemotherapy. This is before we really had any treatments for any major illnesses. There's no antibiotics, no anti-microbials at all.

Siim Land (2:07)

It was the 19th century, right?

Dr. Scott Sherr (2:09)

What's that?

Siim Land (2:10)

It was the 19th century, I think.

Dr. Scott Sherr (2:12)

Yeah, exactly. So Methylene Blue was created. It was a synthetic dye in the 1870s, and it was used to dye things blue, including blue genes, actually. And somehow they realized that it treated malaria at these high doses, and at the same time didn't kill or harm normal cells, and that's how it got the name of a magic bullet. And in 1897, it was the first drug registered with the FDA here in the United States at that time, and it was actually for malaria. And really, it was the only anti-microbial around until the 1950s, when penicillin came around after World War II. So it was used for urinary tract infections, fungal infections, viral infections, used for specifically gram-negative bacteria, and it actually would combine with things like sunlight and actually work better. And we now know that it's a combination of red light or near-infrared light specifically in combination with methylene blue, has a synergistic effect for killing bugs when you use high strength or high doses of methylene blue in combination with high strength lasers, specifically with the near-infrared light spectrum. So it was used as an antimicrobial, and when antimicrobials came around, like your penicillins of the world, people stopped using as much methylene blue. And there's a couple of different reasons for that. One of the main reasons is that methylene blue increases the amount of, so it actually concentrates in the urine when you excrete it. And so when you urinate, you have blue urine when you actually urinate with methylene blue on board at very high doses. Actually, it will turn some of your other secretions blue as well, including your poop, actually, at very, very high doses, like over like three milligrams per kilogram. So where methylene blue got its kind of angle from being from a human population is actually starting being used in fish tanks in the 1950s and 60s. And now until this day is still used in fish tanks to be a fish tank cleaner in quotes. But it's really cleaning the fish, not the tank itself. And so anybody that is an aquarium person will know this more than I do, actually. But so you take out the fish, you actually treat the fish with methylene blue. And this treats their fungal infections and all the other things that can happen in there. So that's how it got this. And then it's still used to this day. And then there were some funny headlines in the beginning of the pandemic, Siim, that I think you know about. It was like there was this one headline that biohackers are drinking fish tank cleaner to reverse their age, which was, it's a great clickbait headline that would be good for eyeballs, right? So that's what they used. And of course, you don't want to be drinking fish tank cleaner because fish tank cleaner is not going to be the kind of methylene blue that you want. You want methylene blue that is clean, that's been tested, that is free of heavy metals because what actually can happen during the manufacturing process of methylene blue is you can get contamination with mercury, lead, arsenic, and cadmium.