IMHO Only way to take ALA is Cutler style, which is frequent dosing every 3 hours, 3 days on 4 days off. Anything else............anything else and you are on a chelation protocol that MANY people have been seriously screwed up with. Long term screwed up too. I believe its called an "inappropriate protocol" but the choice is yours if you wish to take the risk of hurting yourself.

It amazes me that people continue to take unnecessary risks when trying to get the mercury out. I have never inappropriately dosed chelating agents because :
I don’t want to risk hurting myself anymore that I already am,
Appropriate dosing every 3 hours is simple and easy, is tried and tested and has significantly less problems than random dosing(even at low dosages.)

I don’t need to read a report on pubmed or anywhere because I can read about real peoples successes and failures everyday on Yahoo Frequent dose chelation.

ALA is specifically used because it crosses the blood brain barrier.
If you don’t wish to get at the mercury in yr brain, then dmsa or dmps will do the trick. Again frequent dosing seems to be the method with least problems.

The reason you are getting nasty symptoms is because ALA only has a half life of 3 hours in the blood. So after 3 hours the ALA is used up and guess what……yup you have the mobilised mercury bouncing around inside you with nothing to escort it out. The symptoms you are having is the mercury redistributing somewhere inside you.
Doesn’t matter you are only taking what you consider small doses of ALA, it still only has a half life of 3 hours and you will still get redistribution when the ALA runs out after 3 hours.

Take care