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.]