I agree with Sunshine, caution is the best way to go. The fact you are still getting some strong symptoms on 50 mg, after just 28 hours indicates it's actively chelating metals (of some kind and no doubt it's mercury). If you had 25 amalgams, that is (I think) a no brainer. Unless you are one of those lucky lucky people who seem to be able to excrete it better than others. I doubt even the most healthy person would last too long being healthy with that amount of fillings in their mouth. If they do, sometimes it only takes another knock to the health before the poisoning sets in. Just one more challenge on their immunity and often they slip into chronic toxicity. Which may indicate the mercury was building up in their tissues all along, but they didn't notice the effects. It catches up often one way or the other. I never noticed much at all, (though looking back I can see how it may have affected me), but once I had braces placed on my teeth, that's when all hell broke loose and all the years of having amalgams suddenly showed it's effects.

I think having a strong reaction to ALA is proof of mercury (or other metal toxicity) yes. I only got strong reactions when I was mercury poisoned, but didn't get anything when I wasn't....only a flare up of my yeast problems and that was it. No real symptoms otherwise. I may as well have taken a sugar pill! Because it was pointless.

I did most of my chelating with DMSA though, I never really did the ALA. I probalby should have though but I think DMSA did most of the job. I tried ALA once and had a very strong reaction to it. But once the mercury was mostly out of me, trying ALA again, even on very high doses did nothing. I gather my organs don't have much in there these days. My health problems are different now though and are infection related, rather than metal toxic related.

You may not need to bother with a challenge test. The symptoms alone on a chelation round can be pretty diagnostic! Even Andy says in his book that some try around 100 mg or more of ALA as a challenge test and he mentions the symptoms themselves as being a strong indicator on their own! He did say to those that will try higher doses like this to be careful and warn other people of the possible symptoms that might follow.

Chelation doesn't do a thing for me now, so I've pretty much ditched it. I've thought about trying DMSA again at some point and make sure it's a longer round and see if anything happens, but frankly I don't think it will. Certainly if there "is" any mercury, I doubt DMSA would get it. It would likely be organ/brain mercury, but my ALA trial didn't seem to indicate anything was there and I got a worse case of yeast for trying!

If you split the tablets, just do it as well as you can. It doesn't have to be "perfect". If you're not sure about it, I'd do a few more rounds on the same dose as you are, and then try and lengthen the rounds a bit. Increasing dose can come later and as Sunshine said, you're on good dose as it is and looks like it's doing something anyway. It's not a race! A backfire is not something you want to experience and then take time to try and recover from.

No matter how perfectly you try and do this, how fast, you will usually be chelating for about 2 years. Again, just as Sunshine pointed out. I was starting to dump mercury by age 26 (I had amalgams out by age 24), so it took about a year and a half or so before the organs began to dump the stored mercury. That was agonising once it started, and then by age 27 I was constantly going through that natural detox, but speeding it up with mobilising agents and chelating agents etc, and started to come out of it by age 29. You notice ups and downs during that time. For me it was a very very painful transition to health. I was often bedridden with symptoms, crying, salivating, shaking during my healing crisis to health. Much of that was intolerable and unnecessary and caused by messing around with all kinds of stuff to 'detox mercury". Cutler's was the key to a more effective, stable way to remove the mercury. I think that's what really got me there in the end to be honest. It also cuts down the risk for damage created by redistribution.

I had a very very long drawn out journey because my body just didn't do a thing with the stored mercury until nearly 2 years after the last removal, which is unusual. So I didn't know it was there, I didn't understand mercury poisoning at that time. So I simply wasn't detoxing either way. Most people will start dumping earlier and are almost forced to detox from then on. Your body tries to do it by itself, but it is obvious it needs help.