Dr Sarah Myhill explains the extraordinary usefulness of Methylene Blue in combating issues of fatigue and low energy.
Methylene Blue is an extremely old medicine, favoured in the 19th century for its antiseptic properties, that still has an important place in orthodox medicine for one particular application. The relentless rise in energy-related conditions, not least as an element of the experience of cancer and cancer treatment, has seen increased attention given to Methylene Blue for its ability to positively affect mitochondria, the energy generators of our cells. Methylene Blue seems set to be an extremely useful resource for people with cancer.
References from the show:
* Please scroll down if you prefer to read the transcription.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Comment *
Name *
Email *
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Δ
Robin Daly Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK health Radio. I’m Robin Daly and I’m hosting today’s show as usual. I’m also founder of the UK charity Yes to Life that’s been pushing forward the cause of integrative medicine for cancer for the last two decades, helping people find out about lifestyle and complementary approaches through which they can help themselves through treatment and hopefully to a lasting recovery.
Robin Daly My guest today is a leading expert not in cancer but in chronic fatigue type conditions, heme and the like and this means her knowledge and expertise has much relevance to those with cancer who commonly suffer from this type of condition.
Robin Daly I’m speaking to Doctor Sarah Myhill at her clinic near the Welsh borders. Hi Sarah, so great to have you as my guest on the YES to life Show.
Dr Sarah Myhill Thank you, Robin, very kind you fire away some questions and I shall do my best to address.
Robin Daly excellent. So today I’m righting a wrong that I realise as I’ve never had you with my guests on the show before. Can’t believe it. The good news is here you are, and today we’re going to bring together two of the most compelling and fascinating resources for people with cancer and chronic disease and speaking about them independently and in combination.
Robin Daly So I’m talking about photodynamic therapy or PDT as it’s known for short, and Methylene blue, both both really venerable therapies with long track records. So for many people listening, the both of these might be new territory.
Robin Daly So I think we’ve got to summarise the basics first, like let’s start with methylene blue. What is it and why might it be of interest to a lot of people with a variety of chronic diseases?
Dr Sarah Myhill Well, the key point when addressing any disease, it doesn’t matter what that disease process is, is what are the mechanisms by which that disease is being caused, is being created. Because if you know what the mechanisms are, then that has obvious implications for management.
Dr Sarah Myhill So we have to ask about mechanisms. Now, when it comes to cancer, we have to ask what is the mechanism by which that cancer has arisen? And what’s so fascinating about cancer is it’s been long thought to be, Oh well, it’s genetic damage to, to this the, the, the, the DNA in cell genome.
Dr Sarah Myhill And that’s what’s driving the tumor. And we now know that is not the case. And you’re probably aware of some fascinating experiments done by Thomas Seyfried. Well, I certainly highlighted by him who looked at cell cells that degrade in vitro and there was one cell line that was cancerous and one cell line that was normal cells.
Dr Sarah Myhill And what he showed that is if you took the nucleus from the cancer cell and you pushed in normal cells, the cells remained normal. If you took the cell, the nucleus from the normal cells and put that in a cancerous cells, the cell remained cancerous.
Dr Sarah Myhill So what that tells us is it’s not the nucleus that’s the problem. It’s something in the the cell cytoplasm, it’s something in the metabolism, the cell itself. And we now know what that something is. It’s mitochondria, and what makes cancer cells different from normal cells is cancer cells switch off their mitochondria and they get their energy through fermentation and, and that is the fundamental difference.
Dr Sarah Myhill So what that tells us is that anything that we can do to improve mitochondrial function is going to help the immune system fight that cancer cell. And that’s what it’s all about because we know we all have the power within us to heal that cancer that we may have.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, obviously it’s, it’s, it’s, and I think of this as as a, as a, as a war, as a battle. And the fact of the matter is we’re all throwing out new cancer cells all the time. And but the immune system recognise those cells are bad, nips them off, kills them off before they, the numbers build up and cause pathology.
Dr Sarah Myhill So we’re doing producing cancer cells all the time. Of course, if they get if, if, if the immune system starts to lose that battle and we have large numbers of, of cancer cells build up, then yes, we’re diagnosed with a breast tumor, with a prostate cancer, with a lymphoma, with a leukemia or whatever.
Dr Sarah Myhill And at that point then sometimes, yes, we have to use the big guns just to reduce the number of cancer cells, which might be surgery, it might be radiotherapy, it might be chemotherapy. And you know, for some people, there’s no question those interventions are essential to save their lives.
Dr Sarah Myhill But I and you and I start to come in at the point where a, we don’t want to get cancer in the 1st place, maybe everything that can be done has been done and we want to stop secondaries developing. And that’s the point where you and I can be useful because we can teach people the sort of things they need to do to look after their mitochondria and to and to supply the immune system with the raw material that it needs to function.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, as you pointed out, methylene blue is going to be a very use is already a very useful tool to improve the body’s defenses against against cancer. And the joy is it’s a very simple tool to use. It’s a very safe tool to use.
Dr Sarah Myhill It’s a very easy tool to use. And we have to do it in conjunction with all else. Now, many people listening to you and I talking will be thinking, oh, I wonder what we can do, You know, one simple thing we can do in order to cure our cancer.
Dr Sarah Myhill And it’s not like that, you know, methylene blue is just one tool. It’s not the most important tool. We have to apply everything because it’s very tempting for people to say, oh, I’ve got a cancer. I don’t want to change my wicked ways.
Dr Sarah Myhill You know, I don’t want to change my diet or my lifestyle. You know, I don’t want to give up smoking. I don’t want to give up drinking. I don’t want to give up my sugar in carbs. I just want to do something easy to get rid of my cancer.
Dr Sarah Myhill It’s not like that methylene blue won’t work. It has to be part of a whole package of treatment and as part of that package, it’s a very useful tool. So the package obviously starts off, as you know, with with diet.
Dr Sarah Myhill If you’re not prepared to make major change to your diet to cut out the sugars and the carbohydrates, then the methylene blue simply isn’t going to be that helpful. So we start off with a whole other package of treatments, but when when coming to methylene blue, methylene blue works in in in many possible ways to help cancer.
Dr Sarah Myhill The first thing it does is it helps to improve mitochondrial function. Now, mitochondria, as you know, are the little organelles within cells that generate energy. You know, and mice. It’s mitochondria that make the difference between life and death.
Dr Sarah Myhill If you can’t generate energy in that cell, that cell is dead. The cell is dead, the organ is dead. If the organ is dead, you are dead. So mitochondria just so absolutely vital for this and they work essentially by moving electrons around and by moving protons around.
Dr Sarah Myhill You know, they’re an electrical organ if you like. And we’re not going to get the mechanics of that, but they have to be very good at handling electrons and handling protons. And that process has to occur in as frictionless as way as possible.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now methylene blue is so interesting because it facilitates electron movement within mitochondria, It allows mitochondria to work much more efficiently, it helps with energy delivery mechanisms and therefore it’s going to be useful for any condition associated with poor mitochondrial function.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now that’s where I got interested in it because as you know, my specialist interest is patients with fatigue syndromes. And of course fatigue is often a feature of people with cancer, yes, with fatigue syndromes because it helps energy delivery mechanisms, it allows our mitochondria to work more efficiently and therefore as implicated for any disease process associated with poor energy delivery.
Dr Sarah Myhill So yes, cancer, yes, chronic fatigue, synap, yes, heart disease, yes, dementia, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So, you know, that is a very useful starting point. The other way by which methylene blue is helpful is because we now know that nearly all cancers have an infectious driver or an infectious associate.
Dr Sarah Myhill So for example, many of the herpes viruses like Epstein Barr virus, like HHV 6, like Cytomegala virus, like herpes 1 and 2, like human papilloma virus, we all know that they can drive cancers. We and, and IE most cancers have an infectious driver.
Dr Sarah Myhill And again, methylene blue is very helpful because it has broad spectrum antimicrobial activity. It’s a very useful antibiotic. And the important thing is it does this. It inhibits bacteria and and kills many viruses without causing any collateral damage to the body whatsoever.
Dr Sarah Myhill So it makes it almost the perfect antimicrobe.
Robin Daly Yeah, yeah, very different to to antibiotics and things, of course.
Dr Sarah Myhill Correct And then some people immediately jump up and say, well, what about the microbiome? Isn’t it good to be damaging to the microbiome? And as we know, the last, you know, 5 foot of gut, you know, the the large bowel, the colon, the last section of the gut is full of kilograms of bacteria which do much good for us.
Dr Sarah Myhill You know, the microbiome is essential for our health. It’s essential to get energy from fibre to program the immune system, to synthesize neurotransmitters, to synthesize various vitamins and other such essentials for the body.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the joy of methylene blue is we swallow it, take it by mouth and then it’s completely absorbed into the bloodstream and excreted in the urine. So although our urine will go blue when we take methylene blue, our faeces do not go blue.
Dr Sarah Myhill So the microbiome is is sustained. So again, all these issues make methylene blue a very useful tool for anybody with with well for many different pathologies. And where the photodynamic therapy comes in is that helps to activate the methylene blue because in the body it works by the oscillating from methylene blue, which guess what is blue to leukomethylene blue, which is white.
Dr Sarah Myhill And it as it gives up a electron or or accepts an electron, the colours, those colour slips and photodynamic therapy facilitates that flipping from one form to another. So that enhances the action of that.
Dr Sarah Myhill So these are two very useful tools for people with fatigue syndromes, other pathologies, and almost certainly cancer as well.
Robin Daly Well, very interesting. You haven’t actually said what methylene blue is. Yes, it sounds all very exotic, but what is it?
Dr Sarah Myhill But it’s a dye. It was, it’s, it’s probably one of the first synthetic molecules that was, was were generated. It was generated, it was developed by Paul Ehrlich and in he won the Nobel Prize in the 1880s for its efficacy in treating malaria.
Dr Sarah Myhill It used to be in, at one stage, it used to be given to all members of people in the Royal Navy in order to protect them from getting malaria when they’re in climes, for example. And, and it’s a proven benefit against the malaria parasite.
Dr Sarah Myhill It’s also proven benefit against COVID-19. So, you know, very cheap, very effective treatment that, you know, we should have, should be available to all. It’s also antifungal. And we know that many diseases are driven by fungi.
Dr Sarah Myhill So yes, it is a molecule is it is a dye. Its main use is that that doctors recognize for is for staining tissues. So if you took a a biopsy from somebody and you wanted to look at this under the microscope, you would add, add methylene blue because methylene blue dyes parts of those tissues blue so you can see what’s going on in the cell.
Dr Sarah Myhill And so that’s the the use of that, not as a clinical use. There’s a purely for for pathological slides, but to say it has a great many other functions that are incredibly useful to us humans.
Robin Daly And do we know how Mezzanine Blue made the flip from dying things to actually being a medicine? How as a strange thing to happen?
Dr Sarah Myhill Well, you know, doctors are experimenters and when you are faced with a new disease for which maybe there’s a death sentence or maybe no other possible treatments, then with the patient’s full knowledge and consent, then we can try these things.
Dr Sarah Myhill And of course, it would have been first tried in annual experiments. As, as as many people are aware, it’s often used in fish tanks and fish are very sensitive to toxic stress. So it, it doesn’t kill fish when despite them swimming in it’s, you know, 24/7.
Dr Sarah Myhill So it’s safe to fish. So that’s a good start perhaps. But yes, it it would have been trialled in, in, in other animals 1st to make sure it’s safe to demonstrate its efficacy before it’s pride in humans.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the key with any treatment is always start with little doses and and build up slowly. But because it was has been shown to be so helpful for so many conditions, you know, it’s widely used. Even the doctors use methylene blue intravenously in high doses to treat carbon monoxide poisoning.
Dr Sarah Myhill Very safe, very effective, something we should all have available to us. So it has a wide application. It does not really be safe.
Robin Daly Yeah, amazing stuff. OK, interesting. So one question. I mean, we obviously you’ve made the case for why it’s of interest to be with cancer because, yeah, cancer is a metabolic problem and this is going to help your metabolism.
Robin Daly That has to be good. And so many people, on top of having cancer, have chronic fatigue as well because they’ve got cancer. So all all good in that direction. Is there a link between methylene blue and cachexia?
Dr Sarah Myhill OK, well we again, we have to ask what’s the mechanism of cancer cachexia? Because the shocking thing is, is so many cancer patients are told, oh, you know, go and eat as much sugar and, and dairy products and carbs you possibly can in order that you can put on weight and, and maintain your weight and maybe get fat so that when the cancer cachexia comes along, you’ll survive a bit longer.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, that is rotten advice, but you’d be horrified to hear how many people are given precisely that advice. Now, the reason that cancer, I believe, causes cancer cachexia is because, as we’ve discussed, the only way that cancer cells can survive is by burning sugars and carbohydrates.
Dr Sarah Myhill And it does that by a process of fermentation is anaerobic metabolism. Now, when you generate energy anaerobically, it’s very inefficient. So 1 molecule of glucose will generate just two molecules of ATP for that cancer cell to use.
Dr Sarah Myhill But by contrast, if you are burning glucose through mitochondria, that is done with the present in the presence of oxygen. It’s extremely efficient and one molecule of glucose will produce anything up to 36 molecules of ATP.
Dr Sarah Myhill So if suddenly you’ve got a lot of tissues in your body, IE cancer cells fermenting sugar anaerobically, as you can see it’s incredibly inefficient. It needs a lot of sugar, it needs a lot of carbohydrates to do that.
Dr Sarah Myhill And as a result, energy is burnt very inefficiently and the weight literally drops off. So that is one possible mechanism of cancer cachexia. Of course, there are other mechanisms. You know, some people just lose their appetite.
Dr Sarah Myhill Some people are unable to digest and absorb their food, and so they can’t get the goodness from that. But I suspect this switch into anaerobic metabolism is a major cause of cancer cachexia.
Robin Daly So anything you do to actually address the mitochondria is is going to help in some way to slow that process.
Dr Sarah Myhill Correct. But the most important thing to do is that what makes human cells different from cancer cells is to say human cells run on mitochondria and mitochondria will happily run on ketones. And so the key for all cancer patients for avoiding cancer and for treating it is to eat a low carbohydrate ketogenic diet and and then you are literally starving out your cancer cells.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, there are some fabulous books out there about how to treat how to starve cancer. There’s Jay Mclennan’s book, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. There’s Kelly Turner’s book about a cancer. But there’s but all of them emphasize the importance of diet of cutting out the junk food, which basically is carbohydrate based, of cutting out the processed foods, which is basically carbohydrate and processed fats and consuming a paleo ketogenic diet.
Dr Sarah Myhill Cut out the dairy products because they’re growth promoting the gluten, grains, they’re all high in carbohydrates. But if you eat a good paleo ketogenic diet and test to make sure that you are getting the right results.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now there are two ways that we can test to make sure we’ve got high ketones in our blood and stable, steady low levels of glucose. And this is very empowering for any cancer patient. So we can measure glucose levels using continuous glucose monitoring.
Dr Sarah Myhill And you can get devices on Amazon. There’s one called Freestyle Libra that’s produced by Abbott. That’s you. It’s a little device and you just push into your skin there. It’s painless. And I know that because I’ve tried it and using a smartphone.
Dr Sarah Myhill Then it tells you exactly what your blood sugar is doing. Now you can’t get a blood sugar of 0. Obviously, you know, you would be dead if that were the case, but we want the blood sugar to be as low as possible and as stable as possible.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the joy of the continuous glucose monitoring is you can see exactly what your diet is doing to your blood sugars. Brilliant. And and that is very empowering because you can, you can choose a meal which you think, well, that’s a healthy meal that’s going to be good for me and you can eat it.
Dr Sarah Myhill And then you can see exactly what happens to your blood sugar. Now, if the blood sugar goes flying up to 8 or 9, then that was not a good meal for you to have. That tells you that you’ve cheated or you know, you’ve got to do better.
Dr Sarah Myhill But many people are surprised and encouraged by the foods that they can get away with rather than the foods that they can’t. So that’s a very good start. And the second thing to do is to get a ketone breath meter.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now this is one called Ace Track, which again is linked to a smartphone and, and that’s very useful because we want the ketones to be running high. We want the ketones to be running higher than the than, well, can’t say higher, but in terms of mini bottles per litre, you know, higher than than blood sugar because again, that’s failure and mitochondria and that’s starving out our cancer cells.
Dr Sarah Myhill And that one simple of intervention is going to be incredibly helpful to prevent the cancer from progressing and, and, and help protect us from, from getting secondaries. So those two devices are very useful to keep us on track with the diet.
Robin Daly Some of these the new gadgets do actually make it a lot easier than it used to be to monitor these things and to actually be able to do yourself very easily, which is rather fantastic.
Dr Sarah Myhill Correct. And getting that positive feedback all the time, Yes, I’m doing it right. Yes, I’m doing right is so empowering. Now I do see the continuous glucose Monty, it only lasts 2 weeks. It costs about 55 lbs, but I think it’s 55 lbs very well spent and and then you can start to adjust your diet until your blood sugars are steady and they are stable.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now just one little clinical tip here. The second most important thing we need to do is to take big doses of vitamin C. And the reason for that is that vitamin C kills all cancer cells and it kills all cancer cells much more efficiently when blood sugar levels are low and stable.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the reason I think that the vitamin C is so efficacious is because biochemically it looks very similar to a glucose molecule. In fact, you know, my little dog who’s sitting next to me, she can make as, as can all other mammals.
Dr Sarah Myhill She can make vitamin C from glucose. It’s a four enzyme step for that to happen, but it illustrates the point. The vitamin C looks like glucose. And so if the cancer cells are being starved of sugar because you’re doing a low carbohydrate diet and you’re demonstrating that with your continuous glucose monitoring, they will grab something else that looks like sugar.
Dr Sarah Myhill And guess what? Vitamin C looks like sugar. And it’ll grab the vitamin C to try to burn it as a fuel and that kills the cancer cells. So taking vitamin C in parallel with glucose, herbo charges your low carbohydrate diet.
Dr Sarah Myhill And I like people take vitamin C to bowel tolerance. So they start off with maybe half a gram, 1 gram, 2G, three grams, 5 grams, 10 grams. Gradually increase the dose until you start to get bowel symptoms.
Dr Sarah Myhill If you take too much vitamin C, you get a bit of rumbly tummy, maybe wind, maybe foul smelling, farting and ultimately diarrhoea. So you have to get up to that level in order to get the dose of vitamin C right and then reduce that little bit so you end up with no, you know, adverse gut symptoms whatsoever.
Dr Sarah Myhill Just a little note here, Vitamin C, as I said, looks like glucose. And what that means is when you do continuous glucose monitoring, it will look like you’re taking more sugar. So if you take it, and I demonstrated this myself because it just so happened as I was testing, I started with the the first hint of a cold.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, whenever anybody gets the first hint of a cold, we should take big doses of vitamin C Why? Because that will make the colds less severe and less prolonged. It’s because it contact kills all microbes.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the way I advise is take 10 grams of vitamin C every hour until you get the trots. That’s a lot. So this was so interesting because my blood sugars, you know, hitherto would be absolutely level. Yes, I’d done a few experiments eating a bit of this, a bit of that, to see if I got a little spike, whatever.
Dr Sarah Myhill But I took 10 grams every hour for four hours. So I took 40 grams of vitamin C and my blood sugar reading shot up to 11. So it wasn’t a blood sugar reading of 11, it was a blood sugar plus a vitamin C reading of 11.
Dr Sarah Myhill In fact, there’s a very lovely example of this of a lady who had a pancreatic cancer and she was due for a chemotherapy in the afternoon. So she went and had intravenous vitamin C that morning. Now, of course, you can get much higher levels of vitamin C in the bloodstream from intravenous vitamin C.
Dr Sarah Myhill Of course, it’s not available to all, but she had 50 grams of vitamin C as an intravenous dose. When she went for her chemotherapy in the afternoon, they checked her blood sugar and it came back at 29.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, of course, you and I know she didn’t have a blood sugar of 29. That was a vitamin C effect. But the doctors didn’t know that. They thought she developed acute diabetes. They treated her with insulin straight away and the Jolly nearly killed her because the vitamins, because the blood sugar went so low, she suddenly developed hyperglycemia and blacked out.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now fortunately somebody worked out what was going on and had the good sense to give her some glucose, so she survived. But it illustrates the point that vitamin C gives you false readings on a glucose monitor, so just bear that in mind when you’re doing continuous glucose monitoring.
Robin Daly Very interesting and useful advice. Thank you. All right, so let’s park methylene blue and that side of things and move over to PDT now. So PDT could easily be the subject of the whole show, of course.
Robin Daly So we’re going to have to be a bit light on detail of it. Excuse the pan, although it’s got a long history, as we mentioned, it’s been going for well over century. It seems to have made huge strides just in the last few decades, I think mainly I think through the development of more effective photosensitizers.
Robin Daly Maybe you can tell us first of all, well, what is PDT, What’s the mechanism at work here in PDT? And then we can talk about photosynthesizers and that kind of thing.
Dr Sarah Myhill OK, well, what photodynamic therapy does is it is it’s essentially it’s supplying energy directly to cells for the business of creating energy and for the business of killing microbes and, and killing cancer cells.
Dr Sarah Myhill And, and it’s so it works in a multiplicity of ways. So say by simply by improving energy delivery mechanisms, all the things we’ve talked about will be accentuated. So the mitochondria will work even better.
Dr Sarah Myhill This is why we all love sunbathing. You know, we go we and when I love sunbathing, you know, you OK, it’s lovely being nice and well, but you, you come away from that feeling energized and ready to get absolutely sunshine has Ditto far infrared therapy.
Dr Sarah Myhill You know, I love my patients or far infrared saunas, but any heat will generate far infrared. And that’s all part of photodynamic therapy. It protects against free radical damage. So the mechanism by which the immune system kills microbes and kills cancer cells generates free radicals and it helps to mop those up, to make those less dangerous and less toxic.
Dr Sarah Myhill So, you know, it works in in many ways and of course, but it’s directly, it directly kills microbes. We know that’s the case. And in the 1920s and the 1930s, a well recognized treatment for tuberculosis was to send people to Switzerland where they go to a tougher mountain and they would sunbathe.
Dr Sarah Myhill And for many people that cured their tuberculosis. In fact, Nobel Prize for medicine in 1916, I think was one for a device that was used to photo dynamic therapy to kill skin tuberculosis. So there are many conditions that are sensitive to light.
Dr Sarah Myhill It’s a fantastic treatment. Oh, just another example, you know, I have a water that comes in from spring from, from a spring and we irradiate it with ultraviolet light and it kills all the microbes in the water instantaneously.
Dr Sarah Myhill So it’s, it’s, it’s a fantastically useful treatment. And again, the microbiome is protected because it’s deep down in the in, in the gut and, and, and light photodynamic therapy cannot access the microbiome.
Dr Sarah Myhill So it’s not going to upset our friendly microbes, which should be on our skin, right? So, so, So what it’s doing is it’s doing many of the things that methylene blue is doing and exacerbating those as well.
Dr Sarah Myhill And there are lots of wonderful studies showing the efficacy of methylene blue to prevent neurodegeneration, to improve mitochondrial function, to improve circular. We know that there’s a doctor in South Africa called James Lapaul who’s developed a scalp cap to go over the head and he’s using that to treat dementia and Parkinson’s disease, for example.
Dr Sarah Myhill And he’s using light at H1O nanometers for the wavelength. So you know autism will be susceptible to we know that that helps by laser therapy back end almost any bacterial infection, many inflammatory conditions associated with sticky blood is all going to be helped by photodynamic therapy.
Dr Sarah Myhill And if you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, primitive woman was walking around in Africa, you know, naked in full sunshine 12 hours a day, Right. And so, of course, you know, when the body gets a free energy source like that, it’s going to employ it in a multiplicity of ways to improve health because it’s free, it’s freely available.
Dr Sarah Myhill And now we have developed a ridiculous sun phobia, you know, we are told, you know, oh, if you can see your shadow or then you must put on the sun tan lotion. Don’t, don’t, don’t sunbathe. It’s terribly dangerous for you.
Dr Sarah Myhill Absolute posh. And in fact, studies in America where you look at disease instance state by state, and of course all states hold their own statistics show us that the Sunshine states have much lower instance of cancer than all the other states.
Dr Sarah Myhill So, you know, there’s very, very clear epidemiological evidence that sunshine is very good for us and we should get as much sunshine as we can whenever we can. I mean, not so much that we burn. That would be stupid because when you burn that’s obviously these damaged.
Robin Daly Quite obviously written bad, yeah.
Dr Sarah Myhill But you know, so we have to use our novel, we have to use our sense, common sense. But of course, the way that sunshine is delivered in this country is it starts off in the spring and it gradually builds up and we should be going out.
Dr Sarah Myhill I mean, obviously primitive one would have lived out in the sunshine and of course, so she would and gradually built up and the skin would have learned to go brown so that by the end of the summer we’d have all been having lovely brown bodies.
Dr Sarah Myhill I mean, when I was a child, you know, the, the worth of the family holiday was judged by your suntan when you got home. It was a totally desirable thing to be brown. You know, it was, it was considered to be beautiful.
Dr Sarah Myhill And now it’s the other way around. You know, the young people want to be white, you know, pale white and it’s not good for their health. But what I would say is, you know, get as much sunshine as you possibly can.
Dr Sarah Myhill If you have a far infrared solid, then please do use that. The way I suggest my chronic fatigues and then patients use it is you can buy a belt that goes around your middle like a cover band, like a sort of embrace, which gives you the light, the the red light and the near infrared light that we know is so efficacious and helpful.
Dr Sarah Myhill So that can be very easily worn. You can wear it all the time. It’s like walking around in the sunshine when there isn’t any sunshine. So, but that’s the next, that’s the next best thing to sunshine when we haven’t got it as far as you possibly can.
Dr Sarah Myhill Then I’m very privileged. I, I work in my Conservatory. So I have wonderful full spectrum light all around me. And again, that helps me concentrate. It keeps my brain sharp. And of course, when the sun shines, I’m getting a lovely dose of, of, of, of red light of far infrared light, of near infrared light, which is, is very good for my general well-being.
Dr Sarah Myhill I’m not a cancer expert, but I’m very mindful that many of the tools that I use to treat people with chronic fatigue syndrome, like methylene blue, like photodynamic therapy, like DMSO, like ketogenic diets, all those things, we know they are also additionally helpful to to prevent and treat cancer.
Robin Daly So with PDT, of course, you can act with two sides of the situation if you like, in that you can, yeah, you can expose yourself to light in some way, but you can also use a photosensitizer, a substance with it which is actually going to have its effect.
Robin Daly And there are, of course, a whole range of different photosensitizers, which have been around more than 100 years, the oldest ones, and I think they were a pretty blunt instrument in the 1st place. I’ve only just heard recently about methylene blue being a photosensitizer, and you’ve alluded a bit to why it might be used as one.
Robin Daly Well, methylene blue acts on its own. It really does a job. So do you want to talk a bit about the additional job that it does when you expose it to the light?
Dr Sarah Myhill But it does all the jobs that it does, but even better. And the key with methylene blue is the dose. And with all these things we have to start low dose and build up slowly. Now the jaw of methylene blue is it’s very inexpensive and it’s important to get the pharmaceutical grade methylene blue.
Dr Sarah Myhill You can get the cheap stuff that you put in fish tanks but I wouldn’t recommend that. The pharmaceutical grade methylene blue which will have a little code on it saying BP 73 British pharmaceutical. That was a standard lay down in 1973 which is 99.99% pure or something like that.
Dr Sarah Myhill Right now methylene blue comes in gram pots and I suggest you get a 10 gram pot of methylene blue and add that to one litre of water. Now that gives you 10 milligrams per millilitre per ML of methylene Blues.
Dr Sarah Myhill It’s a very dark, inky solution and normal. A usual dose would be about up to 2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight and possibly more. So I weigh about 60 kilograms. So my daily dose would be 120 milligrams.
Dr Sarah Myhill That’s 2 milligrams per kilogram, which would be 12 MLS of the methylene blue solution that you’ve made-up. Now it is very blue. I mean it’s like it’s like an ink like inky blue. And what I recommend people do is put it into a cup, a cup with some make up with some water, and then add about two or three grams of ascorbic acid.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now, as we discussed earlier, ascorbic acid allows methylene blue to flip between leukomethylene blue and blue methylene blue. And in that pot that will, that will convert the methylene blue to a near colourless solution.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now that’s a good idea because if you just drink methylene blue as it is, it will stain your teeth blue, your lips blue, your tongue blue. You know, it’s enough to fry the horses and, and, and if you’ve got any crowns, it might stain those blue for longer than you wish.
Dr Sarah Myhill So mix it with the vitamin C. That’s a really important part. I can send you my hand out on this Robin with the with with pleasure if you want to circulate that. So it takes about an hour to happen. So if you mix up, you know your class with the methyl in blue, put some say ascorpic acid in there, leave it an hour as it changes, and then drink that during the course of the day.
Dr Sarah Myhill Now it’s very long lasting in the body. We know it’s long lasting in the body because you will pee blue and you’ll pee blue for some days after just one dose of methylene blue. So you can all drink it all back at one fell swoop and then the job is done.
Dr Sarah Myhill And then over and above that, you then put on your cumber band, your infrared waist coat, if you like, which you can get on Amazon for, for just for less than 100 lbs. You charge that up with the battery.
Dr Sarah Myhill And then very often people if they’re cold and that’s particularly easy for my fatigue syndrome patient, they often feel the cold that helps to keep them nice and warm in, in their house as well as activating the methylene blue as it circulates in the bloodstream as it’s passing around the body.
Dr Sarah Myhill So it’s a very, you see, with my fatigue syndrome patients and also to a large extent with patients who have cancer, fatigue is a big issue. Yes. And you know, there are lots of things, you know, we would love them to do, but they simply don’t have the energy to do that.
Dr Sarah Myhill You know, they are struggling already to eat the right foods and cook and, and just just just to exist. So the interventions that we put in place, they’ve got to be very doable. They’ve got to be inexpensive, they’ve got to be doable.
Dr Sarah Myhill They’ve got to be something that that can be sustained. And this is a very simple intervention that’s very doable and has a multiplicity of actions and, and, and most people can easily incorporate those into their lives.
Dr Sarah Myhill I.
Robin Daly Mean, you mentioned that methylene blue is very safe, but are there any things that people should know about it? Is it really that safe?
Dr Sarah Myhill There’s only one thing which again comes out from all my handouts, which is it’s a very mild monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Now that can have very beneficial effects on mood because we know moais are used to treat depression, but it can interact with some foods.
Dr Sarah Myhill So as just to you just have to be very careful about having foods with containing vasoact amines like taramines. So blue cheeses, raw beans, alcohol, you can get an interaction with that. Now, of course, whenever I ask my patients during the, I always try it first to make sure that it’s OK.
Dr Sarah Myhill So I took methylene blue up to 120 milligrams a day. And then I did test by eating things like broad beans, by having, you know, a glass of wine, by adding. And I have to say I had no problems at all.
Dr Sarah Myhill I didn’t get any headaches. My blood pressure remained exactly the same. So I didn’t experience any problems. So what that tells me is that it is a mild MAOI. The potential for interactions is minimal, but people just need to be aware of those foods which can cause possible interactions.
Robin Daly And how about with other medications? I mean, if someone is hoping to address their energy issues when they’re being treated for cancer, is there anything they should be concerned about that?
Dr Sarah Myhill Well, a few painkilling drugs might. Antidepressants might, amphetamines may do so yes, always check. So when I send my hand out with methylene blue, there’s a link to MAOI interactions. So people just have just just another checklist of of of the things that could possibly be an issue.
Robin Daly Right. So for somebody who’s not on any medication whatsoever, but they just feel like maybe they’ve been struggling, they’ve had an infection and they’re not quite kicked back again yet, that could be something they might do unsupervised.
Robin Daly But it Yeah. But if they’re on treatment, it’s probably a good idea to check it out with somebody who knows what they’re talking about.
Dr Sarah Myhill Well, yes, or, or, or just look at, just look at a list of possible interactions, you know, and I’m quite sure everybody can read and they’re quite capable of looking to see that. Oh yeah. It could be sauerkraut, cured meats, some alcohols, maybe some fermented soy products, some drugs.
Dr Sarah Myhill We’re all capable of looking to list because the awful thing is if, if anybody goes along to see their GP or their consultant and says what about methylene blue, I think it’s a jolly good idea. They will be told, Oh no, don’t do that.
Dr Sarah Myhill You know, because those, those doctors themselves are not familiar with using methylene blue in this way. Again, one of the first lessons that I, I, I get tried to get across to all my fatigue syndrome and my ME patients.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the first lesson that any cancer patient needs to learn if they’re going to cure themselves is you have to take responsibility for your disease yourself. Now what we want to do is you want to delegate responsibility to somebody else who will prescribe the drugs, do the chemotherapy, do the surgery and they will get me well.
Dr Sarah Myhill And it’s not like that. If you want to get well from any disease, cancer, fatigue, dementia, heart disease, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to work out the mechanisms by which you got that disease because that has obvious implications for management.
Dr Sarah Myhill And the management, yes, it’s difficult. It all starts with the diet. It all starts with low carbohydrate paler ketogenic diet and there’s only one person that can put food in your mouth and that’s you.
Dr Sarah Myhill There’s no going to be nobody better motivated to do the right thing, and that’s you. And there’s nobody going to be nobody better able to see the effects of these interventions. Am I better? Am I worse?
Dr Sarah Myhill Is it causing this that the new and therefore go and work it out. So OK, it’s very helpful to have guides like yourself, like myself, but at the end of the day, if you are going to really recover, you’ve got to embrace that whole disease, learn as much as you can about it and its mechanisms, and then put in place the interventions in a logical order in order to to get the best chance of a full recovery.
Robin Daly Take ownership. Absolutely. OK, Well, we just got a few minutes left. I wonder, do you have maybe a case history, a story you can tell us about one of your patients who’s had chronic fatigue as a result of cancer and how you’ve managed to help them, what differences it’s made to them?
Dr Sarah Myhill OK, well, 11, lovely day that comes to mind. His lady came to see me with chronic lymphatic leukemia. If you if you should, if you choose to have a cancer, it’s a good one to choose to have because it’s slow, slow progressing.
Dr Sarah Myhill And that means these inventions need to be so much more efficacious than with an aggressive tumor. But when she came to see me, her white cell count was was climbing up high. Now she’d been see the hematologist.
Dr Sarah Myhill The hematologist don’t give any chemotherapy until the white cell count gets to about 50. So by the time I saw her, it’s creeping up. It’s in the 20s and the 30s. It’s creeping up like that. And we put in place all the interventions.
Dr Sarah Myhill We put in place the paleo ketogenic diet. I also asked the question, why did she have damage? You know, what was the cause of her cancer? And a very useful test is to look for a toxicity test, to look for chemicals.
Dr Sarah Myhill And she had very high levels of lindane in her. Now lindane is an extremely nasty organochlorine. We know where her lindane came from because when she bought her house, they were bare Timbers. You know, they were in the house and the mortgage company wouldn’t give her a mortgage until those exposed Timbers had been sprayed with lindane, right.
Dr Sarah Myhill So, so rent skill came in and sprayed it. So it’s of course it’s perfect safe. Of course it isn’t safe at all because the lindane out gases, you know, over the over the years and the decades. So I’m, I’m quite sure she got her lindane from that timber treatment.
Dr Sarah Myhill Well, what we know we know gets rid of lindane very effectively are sauna regimes. So she did some sauna ring to sweat out the chemicals and then wash them off afterwards. And of course, that would have doubled up with photodynamic therapy as well.
Dr Sarah Myhill She did a paleo ketogenic diet. She took vitamin C to bowel tolerance and iodine. Iodine is another one of my favorite tools. And of course the joy of chronic lymphatic leukemia is it’s very easy to monitor progress because you just do a white cell count.
Dr Sarah Myhill And it took about a a year before she really got ahead of the game. And then the white cell count started to come down and it came down and it came down and it came down. So that after, and this was 13 years later, 13 years on, her white cell count was absolutely plum normal and anybody doing a blood test would not have diagnosed chronic lymphatic leukaemia.
Dr Sarah Myhill So we controlled her condition completely with no chemotherapy, no conventional inputs, simply through these basic nutritional interventions.
Robin Daly Simple and to the point. Great story. Thank you for that. OK, well, look, we’re out of time. Been a fascinating chat. I’ve learnt a few things. Thank you very much. So these are kind of topics we’ve been speaking about particularly of interest to me.
Robin Daly So yeah, there are a few things catch your attention in there as being like, wow, why no more people know about that.
Dr Sarah Myhill Absolutely. The answer to that question is follow the money.
Robin Daly Absolutely the.
Dr Sarah Myhill Place where the drug companies are making all their money these days is cancer chemotherapy. And in America, the oncologist purchase the drugs from Big Pharma in order to treat their patients, which means the doctors themselves have a vested interest in using, you know, expensive toxic cancer drugs.
Dr Sarah Myhill It’s a parlous state of affairs.
Robin Daly It certainly is. Yeah. I think I’ve always thought that the greatest impediments to PDT, which is a great treatment. Rather, it’s too successful and too cheap. So All right, we’re going to leave it there.
Robin Daly Sarah, thank you very much for a fascinating chat.
Dr Sarah Myhill My pleasure. Thank you. You all asked all the right questions, Robin. That makes it very easy for me.
Robin Daly I love that chat. Doctor Myhill is someone who has consistently pushed the envelope in medicine and has never shrunk from speaking truth to power for the sake of her patients. The methylene blue, used wisely, seems to be a fantastic resource for those who have cancer, not to mention a whole raft of other conditions.
Robin Daly The handout that Doctor Myhill mentioned is available from the Yes to Life website.
Robin Daly Thanks a lot for listening. I hope today gave you plenty to think about. I guess we all know someone with energy issues who might benefit. I’ll be back again next week with another Yes to Life show, so I hope you’ll join me again here on UK Health Radio. Goodbye.
We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. Learn more.
We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience and enable essential functions on our website. Some cookies are categorised as "Necessary" are automatically stored on your browser as they are crucial for the basic operation of the site - they can no be adjusted using these tools. Additionally, we use third-party cookies to help us analyse your usage of the website. These cookies are stored in your browser only with your prior consent. You have the option to enable or disable some or all of these cookies.
