Confidence tier Unsupported

Methylene blue is a drug with one FDA-approved use: by vein, in hospital, for a poisoning. It is sold as drops for energy and focus. We found no trial of the drops. The trial sellers cite gave 26 healthy adults a single 280 mg capsule and could not tell its memory result from placebo. The boxed warning about antidepressants rests on hospital injections; by mouth, the FDA called the risk "not known" in 2011, and in 2025 Australia's regulator told consumers not to take it unless a health professional advises it.

The NIH's record on sea moss says no medicinal value has been proven. A placebo-controlled trial, written at a company that sells a sea moss ingredient, found no significant difference from placebo. The iodine in dried sea moss varies more than a hundredfold from bag to bag, and one brand recalled 5.4 million jars of gel in 2026.

NR and NMN capsules reliably raise NAD+ in blood. In pooled trials they did not significantly change weight, blood sugar, cholesterol or muscle, and none of the 33 human reports in the main review ran longer than 26 weeks. We found no published randomised trial of an NAD+ drip for ageing or wellness.

Nine studies pooled in 2026 found no consistent link between cramp and blood sodium. Salty drinks do cut urine output for a few hours: in twelve hydrated young adults, by about half a pound.

Cortisol is not a toxin that accumulates — when someone genuinely has too little, the treatment is 15 to 25 mg of hydrocortisone a day. The predecessor idea, adrenal fatigue, was reviewed across 3,470 articles and called a myth.

Moon face is a real sign: most often of prescribed steroid medicine, otherwise of a disease newly diagnosed in a few people per million a year. And hair cortisol’s link to waist size, measured in 24 cohorts, is a correlation of 0.11: about one percent of the difference between one waist and the next.

A physiologist searched for the study behind eight glasses a day and found none. The two candidate origins are a 1945 figure for all the water you take in, which ended by saying thirst is usually an adequate guide, and a 1974 book that said 6 to 8, coffee included.

Americans search Google for sleep hygiene well over 100,000 times a month (from a paid keyword database, pulled 6 August 2026). The insomnia guideline advises clinicians against using it as a standalone treatment — and when 241 trials were pulled apart to weigh each ingredient, it scored 1.01. Nothing.

Cochrane pooled 86 trials and 162,796 people: little or no difference to dying or to cardiovascular events, at high certainty. The 4-gram prescription trial that cut heart events used a disputed placebo, a 2025 trial found fewer heart events in people on dialysis, and the atrial fibrillation risk is clearest at prescription doses.

Twelve men trained both arms for 15 weeks, one arm recovering in a bath of exercise-induced testosterone and growth hormone. The arm with no hormone spike grew 12%. The hormone-bathed arm grew 10%. Two larger studies from the same lab found no link with testosterone either.