Extremely valuable knowledge.
According to some, everyone has some amount of totally unnecessary and damaging heavy metals in their body/brain from exposure to today's environment. A mild form of chelation once in a while should be a regular regimen, unimpeding other supplements from working. For some with unavoidable brain fog or fatigue, this may help. Chelation also removes harmful buildups of random metals not generally considered unsafe that you may by chance be exposed to in large amounts in your workplace or home from some unsuspected source.
CUTLER PROTOCOL is the way, the only safe way.
I bought DMSA to use for the cutler protocol... the bottle said take the entire capsule twice per day. This is damaging! Proper use involves taking small amounts, every 3-4 hours, for some number of days. The blood levels must remain steady. Then a few days are taken as a break. The dosing is repeated, slowly increasing in quantity with each trial.
And the most important thing: a lot of dislodged heavy metals are excreted intestinally (presumably biliary) if the chelator didn't pick them up. This means you must eat lots of fat and fiber and stay as regular as possible throughout, or the metals will be reabsorbed before you use the washroom. The fat is used to stimulate bile production for liver excretion of glutathione; adding olive oil to the diet is a generally good thing, and saturated fat is in fact not bad and (I believe) adding more along with a range of healthy fat sources regulates cholesterol profile (it's carbs that ruin your blood lipid/cholesterol profile).
ALA crosses the BBB which, if you have stored or ingested mercury in the body, will carry tons of mercury into your brain. Thus the Cutler protocol describes that you first use DMSA alone to remove as much as possible from the body (at which point there is a gradient pulling the brain mercury slowly into the body), only then do you add ALA to enter into and reach what's in the brain.
Throughout all this, glutathione should be kept high which involves eating HIGH QUALITY protein sources: nuts and fish, whole grains, vegetables, fruit. Buckwheat has a higher protein percentage by weight than some meats, and the protein is typically more bioavailable, not being burnt and therefore damaged by strange cooking. The protocol also describes large doses of vitamin C are to be taken before, during and after to protect from oxidative stress due to metal mobilization.
As well, throughout this, and in general if you've got a heavy metal load in your body, do not eat garlic, cilantro, chlorella, spirulina, etc. These pick up a lot of heavy metals but do not hold onto them very tightly, so what is happening is they are throwing the metals around, causing damage without doing much to actually collect and carry them out of the body. That is what a chelator like DMSA does extremely well - bind tightly to the metal atom. For this reason the blood level must be kept steady for days, as fluctuations pick up and drop metals unnecessarily.
To conclude: Cutler protocol is the only method. EDTA may work but has been shown to not be as effective (so presumably causes collateral damage as it inefficiently removes metals) and IV chelation with DMSA or related is also very hard on the body. Fast, but overkill and brute. I found my DMSA in capsule form online.
Edited by JoshW, 25 December 2012 - 11:32 AM.
