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Methylene Blue

History, uses, and my personal experience with it

Shefali O'Hara
4 min readMay 14, 2023
Photo by Chaozzy Lin on Unsplash

I was walking around with a blue tongue the other day. No, this is not some new Austin thing, though I guess it could be. It’s a side-effect of a new treatment option I’m trying.

I’m fighting metastatic cancer. As part of that, I’ve gone through a few rounds of chemotherapy which are causing some numbness in my feet. This is similar to diabetic neuropathy. It’s not pleasant.

I started to look into possible ways to treat this.

One method is the use of red light therapy. Another is methylene blue. I’ve decided to try the latter, at low doses, as there is a ton of research published on it and the side effects are typically minimal at low doses.

That being said — it’s a synthetically derived chemical. DO NOT try without first talking to your doctor.

What is methylene blue?

History

Methylene blue was discovered during an era when the German chemical industry was booming. At that time, experimentation was the norm. Discovered by chemist Heinrich Caro as a chemical dye in 1876, it was used in 1891 by Guttman and Ehrlich to dye malaria cells. They discovered that not only would the substance colorize the parasitic cells, making them visible, it would also kill…

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Shefali O'Hara
Shefali O'Hara

Written by Shefali O'Hara

Cancer survivor, Christian, writer, engineer. BSEE from MIT, MSEE, and MA in history. Love nature, animals, books, art, and interesting discussions.

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