The big switch

[C]helation dosing every 3 hours is a pretty standard interval but some people find they feel better with more frequent doses. On round 5, I tried increasing my dose frequency to every 2 hours and 24 minutes and it went pretty well until day 3 when I had a nasty meltdown. Later I realized that the meltdown was not related to the frequency as much as it was to the increase in daily cumulative dosing (I had increased my dosage from 400 mg to 500 mg a day of both DMSA and ALA).

So yesterday, I decided to try 2 hour dosing (with a couple longer intervals at night) but I decreased my ALA from 60 mg to 50 mg to keep the total daily ALA fairly constant. My schedule looks like this:

It’s a little early to say but it seems to feel a little better. It’s silly, but in addition to eliminating a half an hour of fatigue/dragging at the end of each interval, I also feel more proactive by taking more doses. Each time I take a dose, I feel like I’m doing something to recover!

My biggest concern about more frequent dosing is the effect on my sleep. So, what happened? The difference for me is that my longest stretch of the night is 30 minutes shorter. Last night, when I woke up at 2 AM I felt drugged, I was so knocked out, and even thought “I need to be careful not to fall over”. This is probably because I take a lot of sleep supplements at bedtime:

• GABA-Relaxer
• 5HTP – 50 mg
• iodine – 25 mg
• lithium orotate – 5mg

Even though I am feeling a little sleep deprived, both of my first sleep stretches were deep, so I feel well enough today to keep rolling on the new schedule. I know from experience that these things take a few days to test fully…

Update: After posting about my new schedule on FDC, Alex wrote me this:

Your dose timing is good, I dose at 2 hours and it is the only way that chelation works for me, here is my schedule:

12 am, 2:45 am, 5 am, 7 am, 9 am, 11 am, 1 pm, 3 pm, 5 pm, 7 pm, 9:15 pm

I go to bed at 9:15 and put the 12am and 2:45am doses next to my bed, my alarm wakes me up for both and I have never missed either of these. For the 5am one, I am already waking by this time of day, so this one is easy.

My schedule is slightly different to yours in that it is not possible for me to make 3 hours even at night without feeling pretty rough the next day, I could not tolerate the 3/4 hour schedule that most seem ok with, it just left me feeling completely wiped out all of the time, moving to the 2 hour schedule like yours smoothed out a lot of the problems. Moving to the schedule above with the slight tweaks allowed me to move from 30mg of ALA (don’t do DMSA anymore it causes too many issues on the candida side) to 200mg of ALA across a few months.

I have gone from bedridden 2.5 years ago sleeping for 18 hours per day to almost fully functioning, so chelation works. You seem like you have the analytical attitude to work your way through this mess, a lot fail because it is too complex. Tweak your schedule and you will find a perfect schedule that works for you – some people’s metabolism works fast and slow at different times of the day and it is this that is the crucial part of the timing.  Get vit c and mag into your chelation doses if you are not doing that already then you are getting a good spread across the day.

I did a round back in january that was 50+ days of 200mg ALA and felt pretty good all the way through, unfortunately I became very zinc and mag deficient after that round and had to juggle my supplements again, upping my zinc to 80-100mg in a single dose at 8pm (zinc was knocking out my adrenals if taken during the day). I have been chelating for 2.5 years but in reality only 1.5 years as 1.5 years ago more hidden amalgam was found so I only consider the post amalgam period significant, if I was to put a time on things at some point next year chelation will stop hitting me hard and the 200mg dose should be symptom free at some point, then that is the 1 year from full recovery point for me.