Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: These are novel chemicals and most sources you can find them from are questionable at best. Don't even consider using these without deeply researching the risks from the specific peptide, the quality control of the supplier, as well as the inherent risks of injecting substances of questionable purity.

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BPC-157 is a really interesting peptide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPC-157

"It has been tested in animal trials for cytoprotective and wound healing activities. BPC-157 can contribute to wound healing due to muscle and tendon rejuvenating properties through accelerating the rate of angiogenic repair."

It is cheap and readily available (on Amazon even!), when injected it appears to greatly accelerate recovery from injuries - it's been called the "Wolverine drug" (as in the x-men character with superhuman healing powers). It requires injection, so its use is most common in bodybuilders who are aren't as averse to injecting questionable substances.

Many stories from people claiming it successfully repaired years-old tendon injuries and such. Some claim that oral administration can help with gut issues as well.

Some select testimonials: Rotator cuff injury recovery - https://www.reddit.com/r/Peptides/comments/8iqbv9/bpc_157_is...

Bicep tendon rupture recovery - https://www.reddit.com/r/powerlifting/comments/5ewi2j/bpc157...

Non-surgical repair of rat achilles tendon - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16583442

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Melanotan is another interesting one - it's an injectable peptide that increases melanin in the skin. From the image journals I've seen reporting progress over time, it definitely is highly effective - one individual used for several months and went from a pasty caucasian to looking Indian or almost Black. He decided to discontinue his trial when his friends started making 'blackface' comments.

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I think it's a really exciting area of research, and I'm glad the people willing to take these risks post about it so readily on the /r/Peptides subreddit. Not for me, but I'm glad they're publishing the results of their n=1 studies!

Melatonin and Melanin are closely related chemicals that are used all over the body and are synthesized in the body through related mechanisms and pathways. Melatonin is used in the sleep-wake cycle and melanin is used by the skin to darken it and protect from solar radiation. When you need to sleep and when you need solar protection tend to be inversely related. The interaction between these processes is still being studied and is likely to involve many other things currently not under study.

In general, unless you are under the close supervision of your doctor, I would HIGHLY AVOID injecting peptides or really any other thing into you. In relation to just melanin and melatonin, the interactions are complicated and not well understood. We likely do not have the full picture of what melanin is doing in your body and there could be big problems. There also could be no problems at all. That said, I would not want to be the test cases for a M&M conference on this.

I do not think that people on /r/peptides are doing anything but unnecessarily putting their health at risk and (possibly) doing harm to their families, friends, and other relationships. As we know so little about this area of research, the risks are not well constrained and could result in death or worse. When it comes to health and wellness, especially biochemically, it is much better to leave it to ethical and well trained medical researchers that know what to look out for and how to help when things go bad. Auto-biochem hacking is a hard pass from me for now.

While I agree personally, I am comfortable letting others experiment with new drugs and take on that risk with the potential to discover things a bit faster than traditional medicine. Regardless of what you think of CBD, it has garnered steam because of non-medical use and I think brought it up to popular culture which researchers are then hearing about and interested in researching more.

At the end of the day, in the USA, we tend to avoid telling adults what to put in their bodies. I like it that way and I see this as just an extension of the same thing.

That being said, they shouldn't be selling their solutions or misleading people with non-existent medical data. You are hacking your biology, death and injury are very real potential risks you can only accept for yourself.

researchers have been working on CBD much longer than it was in the popular culture (I'm not contradicting your statement that it garnered steam in the popular culture). For example, in England there is a whole company that has gotten CBD through clinical trials and approval (you couldn't have done this in the US at the time). The researchers knew two decades ago that CBD had medical potential, although they only completed trials in 2015 and it was approved in the US in 2018.

One of the big changes for researchers (in the US) is that it's a lot easier to obtain materials, but it's still really onerous.

Totally agree, and your comment compelled me to add a disclaimer to the top of my comment to discourage anyone from jumping into these based on the reported benefits without understanding the serious risks.

That being said, if people are going to try these, I'm glad that they are sharing their experiences online to both warn others of negative reactions and indicate promising avenues for further clinical research.

I would love to see a website that organizes clandestine research like this in a way that makes it more functionally useful - reddit and other forum testimonials are the best I've seen so far, and they leave a lot to be desired. This is something that I'd like to work on, but my biggest concerns are legal liability and how to screen out profit-motivated fake testimonials.

The comment you are replying to is referring to Melanotan and you are referring to Melatonin. Two very different things (but the same caution about injecting peptides should apply to both)

You point out an important distinction. However,

Melanotan has been reported to cause yawning and sleepiness as a side effect, so I think concern that MelanotAn could interfere with the melatonIn system is certainly plausible.

I've been trying to get the capsule form of it for gut repair, but there are only two companies that make it and they are always out of stock. BPC-157 is certainly interesting and I would love to try it.

I've read of people preparing the injectable form with bacteriostatic water and syringing it directly into the back of their throat and swallowing, or into a capsule for swallowing.

Definitely do your own research before forging ahead - these are uncharted waters with inherent risk - but it is supposedly stable in gastric juices so I don't think encapsulation necessarily requires anything fancy.

Wow. Didn’t know there was this whole subculture.

> one individual used for several months and went from a pasty caucasian to looking Indian or almost Black

Crazy to think there's people out there doing this not for a high, maybe not even for science, but for...?

Wow, this isn't the one I saw, but good demonstration of potential results https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/18oy72/before_after_pi...

That is bizarre. From the comments:

"The side effects reported were mild nausea and a "stretching and yawning complex" that correlated with spontaneous penile erections."

It's great that there's some folks out there experimenting, but I think I'll wait a generation or two before joining in.

No kidding, good luck guys and gals. Let me know how that goes in twenty years.

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