I was all gung-ho to start taking ALA and Carnatine and then I found a few things that made me think we still don't really know enough about what they are doing.

First off, I never really liked how RLA and ALA, can be used for heavy metal chelation and many providers combine it with B1 because they were finding it depletes B1 .... this just made me skittish that we don't really know whether/how it is affecting minerals/B vitamins that that we need.

Then I came across a recent study showing the Carnatine actually made PN worse for some chemo PNers (do a search of posts under my username).

I had the experience of thinking B6 helped me and then found out I ended up with toxic levels which made my PN worse.

The Hippocratic Oath that all doctors around the world must take is to "Do No Harm" (i.e. do not make the problem worse). There's also the expression DSDA (Do something Do Anything). Sometimes in our compulsion to "Do Something!" we have to be careful to not actually make the problem worse. Body chemistry is so complicated that bumping up one chemical affects other chemicals.

Some people have reported ALA and ALCAR help, some say it does nothing. I just didn't have that feeling in my gut like we really know enough about what it is really doing and if it had a monumentally terrific impact we would have known by now.

A doctor once told me that ailments that have lots of little cures that you could try mean we still don't know how to address that ailment. If there are a few big cures that everyone goes for then that means we know more about what really works.

Natalie