Pauper's Drug Hacks

I am always amazed at what people pay for some supplements or drugs that are dirt cheap if you just switch your head on. Now I am also poor, thus interested in a place where people can offer their hacks, so here it is, and I start us with a good example: Magnesium (Mg)

Daily recommended Mg is ~400 mg, but food contains not enough, except spinach, which gives you oxalate kidney stones.

As supplement, the price is clearly exploitation of the stupid, because it is already cheaper to buy Mg laxative instead and take small doses, but the pharmacist won’t tell you, no, she gonna recommend a “good brand” instead (the most expensive). But even buying one pack of laxative means to pay as much as what can buy enough of it for the rest of time, including having baths in it for whole body absorption - in case of a deficiency this works much faster than eating supplement doses and distributing through blood where much is fast cleaned out into the toilet.

Dr Vongehr’s “风洒沙道可道” solution: Foodgrade MgCl2 is used to cure Tofu and sold dirt cheap, and by coincidence, 1 ml water at 20 deg C, close enough to room temperature, solves 400 mg MgCl2.
Ok, now that includes the weight of two Cl, each molecular weight 35.449, while Mg is only 24.312, thus Mg is only one fourth (95.21/24.312 = 3.91). Thus, I want 4 ml of the saturated solution daily to ensure I got more than enough, considering I sweat lots in my little IR sauna.

I simply have a little tall container, ~ 20 ml, where I keep adding the stuff and a little water so that there is always still undissolved salt on the ground, so the liquid above is saturated solution. (How to add a picture?) MgCl2 is antiseptic, so no problem. I take out about 4 ml with a syringe and add to drinks through the day.

[Do not use a scale. MgCl2 is very hygroscopic and always has water with it. In fact, I soon discovered that adding little water makes lots of solution, and calculating confirmed my suspicion that they sell moist hexahydrate MgCl2*6H2O anyways, not “magnesium chloride” (anhydrous), and that is still hygroscopic. See, with a scale, it would not only be a daily hassle, but you would have been way off.]

  1. There’s no evidence that magnesium will help much for anything unless you’re really deficient.
  2. Some conditions are even associated with higher than average magnesium levels (e.g. Parkinson’s disease).
  3. The use of a laxative is associated with neurodegenerative diseases later in life so if you want to take magnesium do not follow the recommendation from the above post…
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I would also avoid taking too much Chloride. I normally take quite a bit of Magnesium Citrate, but I would not be so happy about MgCl2.

@adssx makes an interesting point about Mg and Parkinsons. I did an interesting fasting/stopping supplementing experiment recently where my cations Na,K and Mg dropped really quite low, but Ca remained about the same.

I wonder myself whether the issue with Mg and Parkinsons may be that there is something about Parkinsons that drives up Mg.

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??? I did not recommend eating laxatives or more Mg than you should or whatever! My post is about helping poor people who need supplementations to be able to do that without being ripped of by the usual suspects.

BTW, the rectal route for rapamycine, trehalose, and spermidine, also fits here, since it greatly reduces necessary amounts, thus helping the poorer among us. The suggested rectal route protocol has now been tried with success:

BTW, from @DeStrider :
Magnesium - 45% of Americans are deficient.
Mg is present in the center of the chlorophyll molecule, with plants being a major dietary source, together with whole grains, nuts, and seeds (41). Mg deficiency affects about 45% of the United States population and has been associated with increased all-cause mortality, poor DNA repair capacity, increased risk of lung cancer and various other kinds of cancer, heart disease, telomere shortening, and risk of stroke (SI Appendix, SI-3 Survival V/M That Are also Longevity V/M 2).

Source:

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Yes if you’re deficient supplementing probably makes sense. But it’s unclear what deficient means and what the optimal target is. There’s a u curve for serum magnesium and many conditions.

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I think it is rather well known what Mg deficiency means, when it starts depleting the bones and so on, and food has less and less. Try to get the daily 400 mg on a keto diet concentrating the few allowed veggies on flavonoids etc rather than green, and you are bound to be deficient.

The difficulty with serum measurements is that they could be high because of CKD. To what extent high serum magnesium itself causes other issues is therefore not that clear.

ChatGPT gives 4–5 mg/dL (1.65–2.0 mmol/L) as a level at which problems start happening. I supplement a lot and rarely get over 1 mmol/L.

It is one of those things where detailed measurements matter. My (almost)fasting week started at 0.84 and ended at 0.74 (which was not my lowest value, but I have not gone below 0.73)

Incidentally Na was 142.9->132.8 K was 5.41-4.5 (Sodium was a record low for me, but Potassium was low, but not a record low).

Probably because higher Mg intake is not associated with a higher or lower PD risk so the higher serum and CSF levels might be due to disregulation of the Mg metabolism or a protective mechanism of the body in reaction to the disease?

Possibly a link to deteriorating kidney function.

Here we can see the 1 kg Magnesium chloride for curding tofu bag; 氯化镁 means “Chloride changed Magnesium”; it does not tell it is MgCl2*6H2O,
and below I hold the closable test tube with saturated solution over the not dissolved crystals, and the syringe to refill and take 2 ml out.