If I searched correctly in the archives of the AMALGAM list, this is Ray Saarela's fist message on Lipoic Acid.

By international law Ray holds copright on his text, as of the date he sent the email. In an attempt to make it more readable, I've occasionally inserted comments [like this] or modified the format. When he quoted others' email messages, their text is >indicated like this. Otherwise I've tried to avoid editing, but there's plenty of possibility that I have miscopied or misrepresented his original messages. If you spot problems, please

Ray frequently quoted in full the abstracts of the research he cited, but he also indicated he'd built (and studied) a library full of complete papers. I have omitted the abstracts, relying on you to go read them at PubMed.

Message-ID: <35255B70.9C0F5465@primenet.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 14:58:08 -0700
Subject: Re: Alpha Lipoic Acid

>Has enyone had any experience with using alpha lipoic acid as a chelator?

Yes

1. Know some it helped with energy&glucose metabolism, been used for as eye-antioxidant, and diabetic neuropathies and more. LEF magazine have had plenty about it, articles and abstracts, and have read all medline has, please read them.
2. Know several cases who also backfired from it, one lady PhD in Tucson, formerly employed by U of A medical deparment where got formaldehyde poisoned, tried Lipoic acid as it has been found useful against aldehyde, but backfired severe from 3 x 100 mg per day after 3-4 days. One man born Finn-Swed
   • [This is Utilization of renal slices to evaluate the efficacy of chelating agents for removing mercury from the kidney.
     (Keith RL, Setiarahardjo I, Fernando Q, Aposhian HV, Gandolfi AJ), which Ray documents more completely in a later message.]

>From what I read it is both a fat and water soluble antioxidant.This may be helpful for chelating nerve cell's which have a sheat of fat around dendrites .I believe t is called myline.

Myelin.
There are numerous abstracts of mercury binding to myelin sheat, I have some as full articles, but not in electronics format, in paper only.

There is information from the past that lipid-soluble chelator British Anti Lewisite (the base molecule of DMPS also, in DMPS the -OH alcohol group that makes BAL lipid-soluble was replaced with a method that was in my organic chemistry book described as "commonly used 1940's carage method of water-solubilizing", namely, the OH-group of BAL was replaced with sodium(natrium) sulfonate group in DMPS, otherwise, the rest of the molecyle stayed the same, propane with 2 sh groups ) was horribly backfiring, causing often worsening of the neural situation, as what happened often was that it bound mercury elsewhere in the body, and as lipid soluble took more of it to the nerves instead of reducing in the nerves.

Thisis why the Extra Cellular water soluble compartment need to be fairly clean for mercury before the I.C./lipid-soluble compartment could be reduced of mercury load for example with GSH-ester or GSH-glycoside that can access neural lipid soluble compartments, then there could be reduction of mercury from neural/lipid/I.C. compartments trough diffusion/equalisation, but it still does not guarantee reduction of symptoms.

Currently, the neural therapy is based on the fact that DMPS, DMSA etc. do not access lipid-soluble compartments, and because for example BAL backfires horribly, in neural therapy the nerves have to be physically injected with anesthetic that allows the ionic channels to open, and releases some of their toxic accumulation that can not escape otherwise.

However, it is obvious that as biochemistry and biotechnology progresses, the need for shooting needles will be replaced with smarter biologic agents that can access the neural compartment, can reduce the toxic load and produ

As more people learn of the damage heavy metals cause to the cells and nervous system, there will be more interest in the future to develop better and smarter treatments to replace the old obsolete war chemicals ( anti-nerve-gas-antidotes ) that are now used just because no-one else has really seriously attempted to develop better biotechnical strategies to remove the mercury from the lipids and neural tissues safely without producing worse symptoms.

Anyways, following the abtract of lipoate, one of very few that handle mercury and lipoic acid, the 1997 U of A abstract deals even much less with it than this one :

Effect of lipoic acid on biliary excretion of glutathione and metals.
(Gregus Z; Stein AF; Varga F; Klaassen CD)

[This indicates] that lipote is useful in liver inorganic mercury detox, but that it is not perhaps at all useful to remove organic mercury from liver. It would seem that glutathione, NAC, glutathione esters are propably better for organic mercury reduction as organic mercury detoxes trough GSH, and these other methods to elevate liver GSH should not suffer from lipoate's problem.

Trying to remove mercury from myelin-sheat is not an easy problem, perhaps some special forms of B1-vitamin that are sold by Ecological Formulas might be more potent, as they are targeted more for the task.

For more information

• Back to the Canary Lipoic Acid page
• More by Ray Saarela:
  • LA poisons the brain - 6 March 2000
  • LA facts - 13 July 2000
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