So buy 5mg, and split the tablet in half.

that'd give you 2.5mg, which is still almost 10x more than what I linked.

it's possible to split and separate them enough of course, but beyond "roughly half" it gets rather difficult. I've considered getting the liquid ones and a micro-dropper for smaller doses (if they'd even be small enough, many combinations are not), but 0.3mg pills are rather convenient and worth the small amount of money for me.

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dinkelberg 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control:

"Melatonin content varied from an egregious −83% to +478% of labeled melatonin and 70% had melatonin concentration ≤ 10% of what was claimed. Worse yet, the content of melatonin between lots of the same product varied by as much as 465%.

[...]

The last disturbing finding was more than a quarter of melatonin products contained serotonin, some at potentially significant doses."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5263069/

"In products that contained melatonin, the actual quantity of melatonin ranged from 74% to 347% of the labeled quantity. Twenty-two of 25 products (88%) were inaccurately labeled, and only 3 products (12%) contained a quantity of melatonin that was within ±10% of the declared quantity. [...] Serotonin was not detected in any product."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2804077

"Half of the products tested met the label’s claim for melatonin, which means they fell between 76 and 126 percent of the claimed amount. Of the products tested, 20 had between 0 and 76 percent of the labeled content, and 35 had between 126 and 667 percent."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/06/25/melatonin...

	▲	Groxx 3 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	dragonwriter 37 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Melatonin pills seem to have extremely bad quality control: Melatonin is treated as a dietary supplement in the US rather than a drug, and this seems to be a widespread problem with supplements, given the incredibly lax regulatory regime.
	▲	dinkelberg 34 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		One more relevant study, but on the health effects of long term melatonin use: https://newsroom.heart.org/news/long-term-use-of-melatonin-s... "The main analysis found: * Among adults with insomnia, those whose electronic health records indicated long-term melatonin use (12 months or more) had about a 90% higher chance of incident heart failure over 5 years compared with matched non-users (4.6% vs. 2.7%, respectively). * There was a similar result (82% higher) when researchers analyzed people who had at least 2 melatonin prescriptions filled at least 90 days apart. (Melatonin is only available by prescription in the United Kingdom.) A secondary analysis found: * Participants taking melatonin were nearly 3.5 times as likely to be hospitalized for heart failure when compared to those not taking melatonin (19.0% vs. 6.6%, respectively). * Participants in the melatonin group were nearly twice as likely to die from any cause than those in the non-melatonin group (7.8% vs. 4.3%, respectively) over the 5-year period." However they were not able to control for severity of the insomnia and used dosage, because that data weren't in the dataset.

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oops, missed the decimal position!

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IAmBroom 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect.

You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).

	▲	Groxx 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		after an initial "... is that a misquote too? sounds super low" I decided to hunt around. I haven't seen anything on that low of a dose... but doing the math, it does seem to make some sense I suppose. a rough check of the total amount of melatonin in your blood at night implies something like 0.5mcg at peak (peak concentration at ~100pg/ml times 5L of blood). lots more is produced in a night because it has a short half-life, but yea, blood concentration is lower than I remembered. what I also haven't seen though is anything covering how well it's absorbed through your digestive system. 0.3mcg intravenously I can certainly see being effective, but orally? sublingually? not sure. but you've definitely got me interested in looking more :) (initial results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin_as_a_medication_and_... implies it varies quite a lot, but I'm seeing it centering around 15%-ish many places. so you might want like 3mcg to hit normal levels? and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5405617/ is implying 1-5mg -> 10x-100x normal concentration peak, so that does hit the right ballpark reasonably well... I guess I'm going to start experimenting with even smaller doses!) I'm not finding any 5mcg on amazon tbh. Likely in no small part because its search is trash nowadays. Mind sharing a link?
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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