When i take this stuff i absolutely feel like crap..suicidal even. My candida comes back. I can barely function does this mean its working? Im so reluctant to take it because all the efforts ive taken to get my yeast under control it comes bouncing back whenever i start on ALA. I know it pulls mercury from the brain where i think most of mine is now stored but to have the rest of my immune system messed up by this stuff sometimes i wonder if its worth it. I dont know..maybe im just looking for someone whos been through this with ALA..tell me it gets better.

Love and light

stuart

Hi Stuart, it depends whether you have significant brain mercury or not. Some people do not take ALA, they detox their body load and seem to feel it's enough. But some feel this is essential as it does it all....I don't know, since I've never taken it long term. I was recovering from mercury toxicity just from doing DMSA, hot baths, antioxidants, moderate exercise and good healthy food, though no doubt I have never completely eliminated all my mercury.

I tried it recently and didn't like what happened. I didn't sense it was moving or pulling mercury out, but I did experience a worsening of my yeast condition, so not happy about that and can still feel it. So never again! Not for me!

Unfortunately with ALA side effects are not suppressed. But dose and frequency are very important. How are you taking it and how much are you taking? Just to get an idea, because you could be taking too much, and/or not taking it frequently enough. Andy says it should be taken every 3 hours around the clock, or you risk redistribution of more mercury into the brain.

But side effects are expected, because it really chelates pretty powerfully apparently. You may need to adjust dose and/or timing though if it is too much....

Some people prefer using cilantro to detox their mercury from those areas, though Andy says he does not know how to use it to recommend it's usage, but he admits some may use this if ALA is not an option, or they do not like to use ALA or other reasons, but I don't think in his mind it is ideal, since he doesn't like to recommend using something unless he's certain of the right way it should be taken to keep mercury from going into worse/more sensitive areas.

Sosick on here uses cilantro and does very well on it. I don't know how you'd react and I'd be hesitant to tell you to just go and do it because it works for someone else. That is really up to you what you'd want to try.

It also depends on how much brain mercury a person has. Some people do well enough just body detoxing with DMSA and/or other stuff and seem to find that even their brain symptoms improve (because sometime mental symptoms can be caused by toxicity elsewhere, like the liver etc). ALA does not just chelate the brain, it chelates other organs too, so it would be hard to say what your symptoms are caused by.

Do you find you are slowly improving as you take the stuff over time? If you have a break from it and clear yeast, are there signs of the underlying condition improving?

How much ALA are you taking?
What protocol are you using?
What timing intervals are you dosing at?
How long have you been amalgam free?

Some people can’t take ALA until the body mercury is greatly reduced first, that’s by time(i.e allowing the body to naturally excrete some), dmsa, dmps or other chelators you may try.

I am almost 7 months amalgam free, I have been chelating for 7 months and I have not tried ALA yet because I still react strongly to very low doses of DMSA and have not been able to increase my dose yet. I assume I have a high body burden of mercury since my tolerance to DMSA is only in very low doses of 6mg’s.

Well when i take it i just get the increase in yeast symptoms. I also feel the need to do 3000 things at once. I simply cannot relax. Even like 2mg of the stuff sets this reaction off. The thing is deep down i know i need to take it, it just annoys me that all my efforts to control my yeast go out of the window. The cravings come back etc. I didnt know cilantro can help chelate from the brain. I may start taking that instead i have tried it and i didnt feel too bad. ALA is just way too much even though i know its doing something positive, its also doing something negative. As for a protocol. I tried 3 days on it and felt absolutely crap. My sugar cravings came back..not good!

Stuart

feeling revved and sugar cravings are classic adrenal symptoms. My adrenals are fully supported and I get this too on ALA rounds. I had to stop my last round after 2 days because I felt so crummy. That was at 12.5mg ALA. I think the key here is dosage - reduce it until symptoms are manageable. I shall go back to 8mg. You might also look at adrenal support to help you through ALA chelation.

For the yeast, I take one sachet of Fivelac a day. This doesn't give me die-off, but keeps things at bay. I do get increased candida symptoms on round, but they go the day after. I stick to the diet as well.

I have had significant improvement on just 6 rounds of ALA - my brain cleared up and I feel less foggy. This is definitely the way forward for me - it's just unpleasant doing it.

Damn the dentists who made this necessary in the first place.:(

Nicola

i can relate stu. for some reason my body doesn't tolerate dmsa anymore (probbaly the neutropenia thing that makes me so sick ebcause of it) and a week ago i took some "fingertip amount" of ala (, just took some itsy bitsy of powder on my fingertip and tasted it, i dont think it was even 1mg!) and my brain feld DREADFUL.. also when i tried doing 12.5 mg before my yeast staretd to wakeup just after the first dose.

Yup thats me. Just a little and it all starts to kick off. I spent three months combating yeast and parasites and i feel that ALA is just undermining all of that effort. Thing is my head does feel a bit clearer after taking it but god that cravings. I could eat everything in sight when ive taken ALA.

Check out this site - http://www.dmsa-chelation.info/

They found "DMSA was the most effective at removing mercury from the blood, liver, brain, spleen, lungs, large intestine, skeletal muscle, and bone. DMPS was more effective at removing mercury from the kidneys."

It states that DMPS does not cross the BBB and DMSA does ..

I read elsewhere that ALA does cross the BBB. That is probably why protocols supplement ALA with DMPS.

Kindest regards
D

Hi Deecee, DMSA does not chelate brain mercury to any clinical degree. The study done to was on rats. Rats have a much more permeable brain barrier than we do, so that's why it could chelate their brain. But this is not the same as us! Though some people do claim it has helped brain symptoms, but brain symptoms do not always mean "brain mercury". Just as body symptoms may not be body mercury, but maybe brain. It's not always easy to tell where the mercury has been removed from that has caused such improvements. It may be able to to a certain extent, but according to Cutler it's not a brain chelating agent, ALA and cilantro apparently are.

I found DMSA very powerful when I was mercury toxic and taken the Cutler way, it was excellent. Though in retrospect, I didn't need to push myself to take quite as much, or for quite as long during a round (I made myself go a full week and that was too much for me).

Stuart, you're in a very difficult situtation. I don't know what to suggest. If you feel it is helping you long term, but making things worse short term due to yeast, it may still be worth going through with it. But if you feel that your yeast issues are very serious, then maybe cilantro might be worth a shot.

By the way, are you taking it every 3 hours? Some take it every 4 hours, but sometimes this is too long inbetween doses and can cause redistribution symptoms.

Also, have you taken DMSA before? If so, how long? Or did you just wait the first few months out without doing anything and then start ALA. Certainly, this stuff must not be used if you still have a high body burden of mercury (e.g. tissue/blood), because it just shifts that up into the brain apparently. Andy has spoken of people miss-using ALA in the wrong way and winding up irreversibly injured....I like to think that over time maybe they would come right. I hate to think of of "irreversible". I injured myself a lot with mercury many times and stayed ill for months on end, but somehow my body recovered over time....so I like to think they would too. But it is never worth the risk anyway.

But yeah, ALA is a bad one for yeast. Even me with my ongoing strict diet couldn't fight it when I used ALA. I can still feel the effects even now. Jinx, you got it too huh? Well I won't be taking it again. I may give cilantro another try. I actually want to make the cilantro pesto! It's a mixture of cilantro, raw garlic, sunflower seeds, nuts and oil etc.

stu,

i'm not a maven at all dealing with chelating but i think i've read when you're chelating that the metals dump out and candida gets worse to protect you. bex would know a lot more about this than me. but if that's the case, then maybe it's a good thing because you are getting metals out. i know that the underlying problem for candida is the metals. so maybe even though it's uncomfortable, you could put it in perspective and take it as a positive sign things are going in the right direction.

Thank you Bex for clarifying that for me .. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/imnotworthy.gif" alt="" />
I am curious as to how much DMSA you had taken and what you experienced?
My doctor wants me to chelate with 200mgs of DMSA which I have refused <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/nogohere.gif" alt="" /> at this time pending further research. I just got Andrew Culter's Amalgam Illness book today and have to begun reading it with much fevor <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/reading.gif" alt="" /> even before finishing Hal Higgins' 'It's All In Your Head'.
I had a terrible reaction to the 'dumps' a week after I took 500mgs of DMPS for the chelation test .. if I knew then what I know now, I would have refused to take that test. But live and learn !
Kindest regards
D

Hi Deecee,

you're welcome! I also thought DMSA chelated brain mercury until I found out how they tested it. I suppose it's a mixed blessing because it's good for using early on to clear out the other areas before using a brain chelator like ALA.

I cannot remember how long I used DMSA for to be honest. I used it in the latter stages if I recall and that's when I started making bigger strides in health. But it was still not easy to go through. I could handle it only when it was taken Cutler's way. I could not handle any other method of using DMSA and if I tried to take just one isolated capsule of it, the effects were frightening. Yet if I took one cap every 4 hours around the clock? The effects were not frightening. Admittedly I still detox happening and often felt increasingly tired as the round went on, which was either chelation of mercury or just the fact I was on DMSA for an extended period of time. I took 50 mg every 4 hours non stop for about a week if I could make it to that long. Sometimes I had to stop after 5 days or so because the effects would often increase as time wore on and became too much towards the end.

I am not sure how many rounds of this I did because I was quite inconsistent and lazy in chelation. I must have felt benefits inbetween because I often missed chelating so I could keep enjoying the improvements instead, but there was still too much mercury inside because I would always feel the effects of the remaining mercury sooner or later, or it was too easily stirred up by other means.

I had my amalgams out in about mid 1997 (the last of them). I got ill immediately following the last removal. Dramatically so, headaches, tremors, the whole deal and this is no doubt because I swallowed the removed grains of mercury during removal because the assistant failed to suction them out. The dam was removed and the grains of amalgam still sitting in my mouth were swallowed. I was told it was no big deal. Yet it obviously was because my lips were shaking all the way home. Then I had headaches and crying spells.

I was 24 years of age. I think I had a bit of chelation, but hardly anything at that stage, done in the wrong manner, though I didn't feel much effects from it then. I went into a kind of remission of sorts. I seemed "okish" for quite sometime. I think it was about early 1999 when the mercury dump hit me (very late I know). (about a year and a half post amalgam removal). And then the nightmare began. I didn't know what was happening. I still remember where I was when it hit (sitting in the car). Wham, out of the blue, the symptoms came and that was it from then on.

Like being repoisoned all over again, only MUCH worse! The stored mercury was beginning to take its toll on me and was now starting to shift (leak back out). I would say 1999 - 2001, up to 2002 were pretty horrific. All my body did was try and dump mercury during that time. It was made worse by a DMPS IV injection, which pushed it all over the place and then forced my body to try and excrete via the skin as well, which then caused all over body rashes (making me look half deformed) thankfully that only occured when heating up from bath, and exercise etc. Took a few hours to calm down. Covered me literally from head to toe. Itching, pink hot rashes, Just incredible and even had welts come up. I knew it was mercury. I think this at least forced some of it out of me. Even just a good quality vitamin C powder, and selenium would be enough to encourage the process even further. Though they helped me as well (hard to explain). My body was in full detox mode and it didn't take much to push it further. Hot baths were necessary to aid the skin detox process.

But I think it was later that I used cutler's protocol and that helped get more out of me in a manner that wasn't too extreme in symptoms. Before that, I had used garlic, chlorella, and lots of things to encourage the mercury to come out, but it stirred it up too much, in a manner i could not control and left me going almost insane at times. Even a homeopathic detox kit (Heels) would push the stuff out too. It was great stuff I admit, but I had to go easy on that as well or I'd wind up pushing too much mercury into my system, more than my body could handle and I'd go into overload. Backfire effects.

I think I used Andy's protocol on and off during the last year or more. Probably around 2000 onwards, or maybe a bit later. I was coming right by 2002 for sure. The differences were marked, both in appearance and the internals (behaviour, everything). I could even cheat on my diet much more too and got away with having this and that without too much bother. If I did get a bit worse, it didn't take long to recover!

It was a wonderful feeling. It was only later when I contracted a bacteria/viral infection that things collapsed (2003) and that is something that never left my system. Unlike mercury, it' wasn't something I could just detox out. But evenso, getting on and sticking to a good strict candida diet at least helps somewhat. Without doing that, I am FAR worse. I also suspect cavitations from a wisdom tooth removal in 2004 (jawbone infection), as I worsened again after that too and found that no efforts I did paid off much at all. Chelation failed to produce any results after that as well.

In a sense, this has been worse than mercury.