1995 animal study showed that taurine helps with normal level restauration of a form of thiamine (phosphate esters ) after its depletion by drug.
I think the combination of taurine + (benfo)thiamine will be my strategy for 2025.
This combination sounds to be a good idea! Coincidentally a treatment scheme for diabetic neuropathy may actually work in the treatment of POIS as well. Besides benfotiamine some of the following could be also utilized. As an available PKC inhibitor lycopene could be used.
I have just begun on a higher dose (100-150 mg) of benfotiamine, but I can certainly see some benefit. Niacin, lycopene, R-ALA and aspirin are also quite useful. ALCAR was less so and unfortunately for some reason I still have trouble with taurine, but this may be specific to my case.
With reference to oxidative stress and the related pathways, the following new drugs are under study such as taurine, acetyl-L-carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, protein kinase C inhibitor (ruboxistaurin), aldose reductase inhibitors (fidarestat, epalrestat, ranirestat), advanced glycation end product inhibitors (benfotiamine, aspirin, aminoguanidine), the hexosamine pathway inhibitor (benfotiamine), inhibitor of poly ADP-ribose polymerase (nicotinamide), and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor (trandolapril).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2013/168039
You might be interested in what r/7e7en87 (https://www.reddit.com/r/POIS/comments/1guili4/comment/lyxhrh4/?context=3) has been sharing at the POIS subreddit. I see overlap with his and your contributions - you might have a similar POIS cluster like I do. His contributions have been huge for my own POIS. He recommends ALA, taurine, TTFD along with magnesium taurate, creatine, methyl donors, cordyceps (high quality brand like Oriveda), D3 and some others. He's constantly updating his stack. I have found him very useful.
We may not exactly know the exact root of POIS, but it surely involves a high level of oxidative stress. Thus any method to reduce this could be useful. For this reason antioxidants, anti-inflammatory agents, testosterone boosters, etc. could be useful. That is why I take about 50 supplements per day, but even so this is still insufficient. Unfortunately even if I find something that works well, drug resistance will soon turn it barely effective. This is also true for benfotiamine as it became less useful after a few days. Later I will try to increase the dose further to see if it changes anything.
Regarding some of the supplements you have mentioned I can also share some experience. Earlier I found ALA to be noticeably useful and R-lipoic acid (50 mg) was even more so, though still not spectacularly. I guess a greater dose would be more useful, but currently I just can’t afford it. I have been taking 2-3000 IU vitamin D every day for about a year without experiencing much, however after I increased the dose to 10000 IU, mostly after reading of your positive experience, I could certainly feel much better. Even so this lasted for only a few days and then I was feeling just as usual even though I kept taking 10000 IU daily for about a month, but then I switched back to 4000-6000 IU, which is the current regime. I have already tried magnesium taurate as well and I am rather sure that it makes my eye symptoms a little worse, without any particular benefit otherwise. Magnesium citrate was the only form that had an apparent positive impact. Taurine also causes bloodshot eyes and increases the burning pain, though it may have some anti-inflammatory effect at the same time. Generally it makes things worse though. I also had problems with creatine. I bought a new encapsulated product containing 650 mg creatine monohydrate per capsule. In early summer I had taken it for a few weeks, but even if I only take one capsule I can feel the enlarged lymphatic nodes in my breast getting harder and more solid. Fortunately it only caused chest inflammation one time and sometimes I could get away by taking daily two, but this side-effect is just too severe as chest inflammation is already one of the worst symptom for me. I can’t say I have seen much improvement on creatine otherwise, but it may possibly help with muscle fatigue. Even so I don’t think the scale is in its favor. I also took a box of cordyceps containing 200 mg extract. I took mostly one pill per day, but taking more did not change much. Of course it is likely that this product is not as good as the one from Oriveda. A discussion on reddit about this tells that the one from Oriveda contains more cordycepin and adenosine. This probably means that one of these or both are the active compounds. Adenosine isn’t discussed much, but the two sources for adenosine I could find are adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and adenosylcobalamin. I have already tried ATP, but it wasn’t particularly effective, thus cordycepin is most likely to be the active compound. I saw he mentioned apigenin as well, that I also believe to be beneficial, though not particularly so. In the past I took chamomile extract capsules and 10 mg of apigenin showed some benefit, though I haven’t tried as much as he had (50 mg). Nevertheless I have been consuming some amount of apigenin regularly as dried parsley is supposed to be the best natural source (45 mg/1g according to wikipedia) and I use it as a spice rather frequently. However I couldn’t see it making a particular difference. I also drink mixed herbal teas regularly and some of them also contain apigenin. A few ones I can mention: chamomile, immortelle, blessed thistle, chasteberry, common verbena, common agrimony, white dead nettle, greater burdock root, dill, horsetail, yarrows. Some of these were quite useful, though it is not clear how much apigenin contributed to the overall effect. I also take NAC (500 mg) and Q10 (100 mg) on a daily basis. I think Q10 helps more, but its efficacy was reduced over time. I would also take more Q10 if it only wasn’t so expensive. I have very varied results with B-vitamins, that I will discuss later in my personal thread. Well, the short version is that B1, B3 and B12 appears to be useful, B2 and B5 doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, while B7 and B9 appears to be harmful in a greater dose. Regarding B6 P-5-P seems to be a little useful, while I suspect pyridoxine hydrochloride to be harmful in a greater amount.