The story

The Physician Who Brought Benfotiamine to American Medicine

Twenty years ago, in the middle of a long clinical career, Dr. Richard H. Mann came across a form of vitamin B1 that almost no one in American medicine was discussing. Its name was benfotiamine. It had been studied and used in Europe and Asia for sixty years. In the United States, it was nearly invisible.

He has spent every year since working to change that.

Dr. Mann is a retired podiatric surgeon, a researcher, and the founder and CEO of Realm Labs, the company behind NeuRemedy®, a benfotiamine-based nutritional product.

Across nearly thirty years in practice, his days were spent largely with the foot complications of diabetes, peripheral neuropathy chief among them. That experience is what first drew him into the literature on benfotiamine, and it has shaped his work ever since.

Since 2009, he has authored seven peer-reviewed papers on benfotiamine, examining the research across conditions from peripheral neuropathy and diabetic polyneuropathy to Parkinson’s, ALS, and Long COVID brain fog. He has lectured on the same material at medical conferences in the United States and abroad.

A single biological thread runs through it all: thiamine metabolism, cellular energy, and nerve and brain function.

His mission today is the same one that has guided him for twenty years. To make the science of benfotiamine clear, accessible, and honest, for any physician, patient, or curious reader who wants to understand it.