I've been chelating with DMSA for several months now. I worked up from 25 mg to 75 mg every four hours. I've also just finished my first cycle of chelation with ALA (50 mg with no DMSA) every three hours, and would like to offer a few comments.

I felt great for the first two-and-a-half days of ALA, and then began to gradually exhibit symptoms of mercury-on-the-brain. For me this is primarily irritability. I stopped the ALA at day four, whereupon I began to feel increasingly better. Over the weekend, however, I've gradually been feeling more and more mercury-in-the-body, which for me is cold feet, pain in side, and lack of fine motor control (the last presumably because mercury in the body can affect the hypothalamus, a portion of which lies outside of the blood-brain barrier).

Here's my take on what happened. The months of DMSA had sufficiently cleared my body of mercury that the concentration of mercury in the body was lower than that of the brain. When I added ALA, I began to successfully dump mercury from the brain to the body, but as mercury began to overload my body's ability to clear mercury, the correct concentration gradient began to abate, and I began to feel it.

If this is what happened, it suggests a modification to Cutler's protocol. Here's the gist of it: Begin a chelation cycle with DMSA and ALA, then drop the ALA and continue DMSA for a few days before going off the DMSA for several days in order to allow copper to dump from the kidneys. This should keep the concentration gradient steep enough to prevent mercury from returning to the brain as the body clears the current ALA-induced load of mercury.

Any thoughts?