Ask A Genius 1281: Methylene Blue, don’t!
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/01
Rick Rosner: So… I looked it up. It was methylene blue.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do you want to bring up fish tank stuff? Is this to take stuff out of your brain?
Rosner: Methylene blue is used to keep fungus from growing in fish tanks. Is RFK using it as a euphemism for his brain or his spine? No. We’ll get to that.
We’ll fucking get to that.
Methylene blue is trending on X because RFK Jr. was photographed on a plane—probably a government plane—squirting methylene blue into a drink. I tweeted, maybe don’t fucking do that.
I used methylene blue for a while. And I got kidney cancer. Twice.
Maybe it’s not a good idea because it’s a heavy-duty industrial chemical. It’s used as a dye. And I was using it because I thought—based on early research—it might help with brain health. About 15 years ago, a company had it in phase two clinical trials to see if it could break up tau proteins and amyloid plaques.
When a neuron dies, it breaks apart and releases a bunch of sticky shit—tau proteins, amyloid plaques. Your brain is an intricately wired system of about 10 billion neurons, each connecting roughly a thousand dendrites to other neurons. So, when a neuron dies and spews out its toxic waste, that junk sticks to the surrounding neurons, choking them off. Then they die, release more sticky shit, and the process continues.
Your brain can’t clean it out, so it gets clogged up. That’s what happens before full-blown Alzheimer’s. You don’t even know it’s happening—because you have fucking Alzheimer’s. And while it’s happening, you can’t know it, because your brain is literally full of death barf.
Methylene blue, in in vitro tests, showed promise in breaking up those sticky deposits and making it easier for the body to clear them out. So I thought, Hey, I want my brain clean. No death barf for me.
But then I stopped using it because I thought, maybe this is too fucking crazy.
And shortly after, I had a tiny little kidney tumor. That’s when I thought, Maybe I’ll never use that shit again.
Now, all sorts of fucking methylene blue lunatics have come out of the woodwork, tweeting about how it cures everything.
Methylene blue stains everything. It makes your piss blue. I assume if you put your shit on a microscope slide, you’d see that while it’s still brown, now it’s tinged with blue.
It’s a super powerful dye.
Jacobsen: Would it make you die?
Rosner: I don’t think so. I don’t think it’ll fucking kill you, because it’s been used in medicine since the 19th century to treat malaria for British troops stationed in regions where malaria is common. It’s also an effective treatment for some blood disorders. But then a bunch of lunatics started claiming it treats everything.
It’s kind of the ivermectin of ivermectin. It supposedly does all this shit well beyond what it’s actually meant for. It has a bunch of off-label uses touted by fucking lunatics. So I had some lively back-and-forths with people arguing about it.
And here’s the thing with so-called cures—many things claim to cure diseases that don’t kill you. There are now dozens, if not hundreds, of supposed cures for COVID. When COVID first hit, it had a high mortality rate.
In the first month or two, it killed maybe 8% of people who got it. Then, as we learned to treat it better, that number quickly dropped to 2%, then to 0.5%—one person in 200. Now, I’d guess COVID is killing maybe one person in 1,000. Maybe even less—something like 0.1%.
We have treatments now that work, plus many people have been vaccinated or had COVID before, so there’s some immunity. But the thing about diseases like this is that they kill a small percentage of people, and the severity of symptoms varies widely.
You could get COVID and be sick for a week or ten days, maybe even have to go to the hospital. Or you could get COVID and feel like you had a bad flu for three days.
So, Lance claims to have cured himself with some antibiotic or some fucking supplement he took. But maybe he just had a mild case of COVID. Lance is in good shape—people fare better if they don’t have co-morbidities.
So maybe Lance thinks he cured himself, but he just wasn’t that sick to begin with. Same thing with every other supposed cure that hasn’t been proven in double-blind clinical research. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of substances—including horse paste—that have been used by lunatics who claim they work.
So there you go.
I’m more of a lunatic than I thought, because I found out I was once a member of the Brotherhood of Methylene Blue.
Jacobsen: I love the use of the word “Brotherhood.” Did you have to cut your hand and shake another person’s bloody hand?
Rosner: No. I just had to piss blue.
Jacobsen: That’s the motto.
Rosner: Some people said it turned the whites of their eyes bluish. I hoped that would happen. You know in Dune, when people start consuming the spice, their eyes turn blue? I was looking for that effect. That would be cool.
But I never did enough methylene blue to make it happen.
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