I appreciate the post Bex. I have done quite a bit of reading on Andy Cutler's protocol, including success stories. Frequent dosing of Alpha Lipoic Acid and DMSA sounds like THE treatment as far as chelation is considered. I am glad he is helping so many people with it.

I am certainly keeping the DMSA and ALA protocol in mind but I plan on sticking with my current plan for now.

"It depends too how readily available the mercury is in you, whether it's easy accessed to where it will likely come out of the pores from the bath and grabbed by the clay or not. If it is too tightly bound, you may not get the benefits."

You have a fantastic point here and this is one I plan on addressing as best I can. Besides the homeopathy and clay baths I have also been doing small doses of cilantro which I just increased to a larger dose (no adverse side effects). It makes sense that I need something to cross the BBB because I think my hypothalamus and pituitary are still quite toxic.

"In normal humans the level of thyroid and other hormones is controlled by the hypothalamus, one little part of the brain, releasing certain hormones that tell the pituitary, another little part, to release stimulating factors. These stimulating factors tell the glands to release their hormones. For thyroid this is TRH from the hypothalamus causes the pituitary to release TSH which in turn causes the thyroid gland to let out T3 and T4.

In chronic poisoning, mercury concentrates strongly in the pituitary and hypothalamus. Thus the levels of TRH and TSH (and corresponding goodies for the other hormones) slowly fall as poisoning progresses, as do hormone levels. Eventually you reach a state where low levels of the hormone don't elevate the releasing or stimulating factors out of the normal range."

I quoted the above from a post by Andy Cutler: http://onibasu.com/archives/am/1635.html. His knowledge of the effects of mercury on the H-P-A axis is not only logical to but it essentially explains how I started to become sick and got progressively worse as the years went by. My symptoms just scream adrenal fatigue. I was treated by a doctor who said I was the "poster boy for adrenal fatigue". It makes sense that mercury accumulation in my hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal glands has been the cause of the majority of my symptoms, especially since I didn't respond to adrenal glandulars.

I base my faith in treatments on two criteria: results in others/myself and muscle testing. Although I have heard of many people helped by ALA and DMSA it muscle tests poorly for me so I don't plan on using it, not yet anyways. I have also been muscle testing my self for "total mercury removal" since I started doing clay baths and the homeopathics 2 months ago, at this point the testing says I have removed 98% of my mercury. I think this is accurate and is in keeping with the theory of a relatively small amount of mercury binding strongly to endocrine glands and causing a lot of problems.

Oh and I don’t have any amalgams left, they were all in my baby teeth and all fell out. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />