In my round 4 wrap-up, I announced that round 5 would be my first experiment at increasing the DMSA strength. Rather than create 18.75 mg capsules, I instead decided to keep the strength at 12.5 mg and increase my doses from every four-hours to every three-hours. This would result in a 1.33x increase in quantity consumed per round. Not quite 1.5x but it was an increase.

After some thinking, I realized it would be easier to simply increase the strength, keeping the interval between doses the same as it has been since I started. I will actually create less new capsules and continue only having to remember to take a dose every four-hours.

As outlined in “A Stopwatch and My Sunday Night Ritual”, I currently pour half of the 25 mg capsule’s content into a new capsule, leaving the remaining DMSA in it’s original capsule. This allows me to only have to create nine new capsules, with the remaining nine coming from the original 25 mg capsule. Pretty easy.

Here is how I am going to create the 18.75 mg capsules:

1. Load new capsule into tray
2. Empty 25% of a 25 mg DMSA capsule into the new capsule
3. Close existing capsule with 75% remaining DMSA content (finished 18.75 mg capsule)
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until new capsule has had 25% of three 25 mg DMSA capsules emptied into it
5. Close new capsule (finished 18.75 mg capsule)
6. Repeat, starting with step one until at least 18 capsules have been created

With this method, every three existing 25 mg capsules will create four 18.75 mg capsules. Because of this, the preparation exercise outlined above will end up creating 20 capsules per round, instead of 18. This will allow me to also increase my round length by two-doses.

In the spirit of competition, I decided to time myself (again) preparing my supplements and DMSA for the week ahead. Here are last week’s numbers:

And here are the new numbers from tonight’s exercise:

It appears I have plateaued when filling my supplements pill planner, but managed to eek out another two-minutes when creating my DMSA capsules. That’s a reduction of 15%. Not too bad. I doubt I will see much more improvements moving forward, and wouldn’t be surprised if the time increases when I switch my dosing from every four-hours to every three-hours.

Last week I timed myself preparing my supplements and DMSA for the week and published my results. The following table is a quick refresher on the results from last week:

I believed that I could shave some time off if I created “a matrix of common weights, allowing me to simply glance at a chart rather than reach for the pencil.” That is exactly what I did and I have the results to share with you. What follows are my times from tonight’s exercise:

I managed to reduce my supplements preparation time by three-minutes, a reduction of 21%. I did nothing different last week, so I can only assume that repetition has shown its reward tonight.

I also shaved 13-minutes off when creating my DMSA capsules. That’s a 46% reduction in time utilized. By simply using a prepared matrix in place of realtime calculations I managed to almost cut preparation time in half. Even if repetition played a part (taking into account the 21% improvement from the supplements time), the matrix still delivered a seven-minute (or 23%) improvement to last week’s effort.

Not all news is good: I managed to lose a handful of vitamin E capsules in the process. Because vitamin E capsules seem to stick together when left alone for a while I decided to vigorously shake the bottle before opening it. It appears the flip top lid Puritan’s Pride uses is not that strong, leading to 15 gel capsules going airborne.

As someone who plays with data everyday, I always find myself looking for ways to improve performance. Whether it’s squeezing more work effort into a constrained timeframe, or finding a new use for what was once seen as waste, my brain is always working on process improvements.

Curious to see how efficient I am, I decided to time my new Sunday night ritual. Although preparing my supplements and DMSA for the week ahead is an action-packed activity, I wanted to take a baseline measurement for future comparisons.

Supplements

While loading a bunch of pills into a pill planner of 28 compartments sounds easy, it is, in reality, rather intricate. There are 17 different supplements with 31 individual pills that I take every day. Dividing these 31 pills into four-compartments, times seven-days does take some time; 14-minutes to be exact. This does not include grabbing the box of bottles I comb through, but that only adds another minute or so.

DMSA

I currently take 18 doses of DMSA at 12.5 mg each round. Since I purchase DMSA at the 25 mg strength, I must split the pills in two. While some go about this activity by eyeballing it, I follow a different path, using The Capsule Machine and the American Weigh Scales GEMINI-20 Portable MilliGram Scale. The process is rather simple:

1. Ready nine empty capsules in The Capsule Machine
2. Place a single 25 mg DMSA capsule on the scale
3. Take the total weight of the capsule, subtract 40 mg (weight of the empty capsule) and then divide the remainder in half. This results in exactly half the weight of the content (DMSA plus filler) in the capsule
4. Open the DMSA capsule and slowly pour the contents of the capsule onto the scale until it reads the same as the result of step 3
5. Pour the powder from the scale into an empty capsule loaded into The Capsule Machine, making one capsule
6. Close the half-emptied DMSA capsule, making a second capsule
7. Repeat steps 2 through 6 until 18 capsules have been readied

The whole process took 28-minutes. Not too bad, but I do see room for improvement. For example, each time I weigh a DMSA capsule, the results almost always are unique. When the manufacturer produces these capsules, there appears to be an acceptable tolerance. From tonights exercise, I found that the capsules can range in weight anywhere from 142 to 158 mg. Because of this known tolerance, each capsule I weigh requires me to quickly crunch some numbers. Moving forward, I believe I can shave off time if I were to create a matrix of common weights, allowing me to simply glance at a chart rather than reach for the pencil.

While some may see this as a 42-minute exercise, I see it as an opportunity for improvement. Every minutes saved can be spent productively someplace else. One-minute may not seem like a lot, but when you add it up over the course of a couple years, you have just found an additional hour and 42-minutes to spend doing something else.

There’s nothing like getting excited to have your alarm wake you at 7am.

It’s not because I was eager to get to work. Nope. I was excited because that’s when I started my first round of the “Cutler Protocol.” Granted, the dosage is only 12.5 mg of DMSA every four-hours, but it marked the beginning of the process, and that’s huge for me.

It also marked the end of the nearly three-week cold I was battling, which postponed the start of the protocol. Not only can I breath better, I am also relieved knowing that the long wait to begin this process is over.

I have three-doses down, and 15 to go before round one (1) comes to a close. I will post an update as to how the first round went later this week.

The objective was simple: start the DMSA chelation protocol the Monday following my dental amalgam removal. That Monday was two weeks ago, and I am still not chelating. Why is that? Simple; I am slowly overcoming a rather rough head and chest cold.

Am I upset about this unexpected delay? Of course, but what else can I do. I am not about to start a detox protocol that requires my immune system to fire on all cylinders, when in reality seven out of eight are miss-firing. Attempting to do so now would only spread my immune system resources thinner, and I need all that I can get to defeat this cold.