When treatment choices narrow, hope often arrives in small, careful steps. That’s how she describes the beginning: a young woman with endometriosis, years into pain that reshaped her days and bent her life around it. Hormonal therapies had left her flat or volatile. Surgery brought two brilliant years of relief—then the familiar ache returned, spreading from pelvis to back and down her legs like a tide she couldn’t turn.
She learned about Sodium dichloroacetate (DCA) from a clinical trial exploring a non-hormonal option for endometriosis. It wasn’t available through her doctors; it isn’t licensed for this use. So she read, asked questions, accepted that this would be a self-funded experiment, and set some guardrails: track symptoms daily, start low, add protective supplements, monitor for side effects, and be honest about what she found. “This isn’t medical advice,” she says. “It’s my diary.”
- Dose: 333 mg/day for Weeks 1–2 (split morning and evening), one week off, then 333 mg twice daily (Week 4–5).
- Supplements: Alpha-lipoic acid 600 mg daily, benfotiamine (fat-soluble B1) daily, acetyl-L-carnitine 500 mg twice daily.
- Tracking: a simple spreadsheet logging pain (0–10), fatigue, bleeding, mood, and medications—with graphs to show patterns over months.
The process took patience and consistency, but her focus remained on steady improvement rather than perfection.
Week 1 -A Cautious Beginning
She started on a “half dose.” Two small capsules divided the day. No dizziness, no stomach upset, no pins-and-needles. “I felt exactly the same,” she says—except that her baseline heading into the week was bad. Period due any day. Pain rising from dull, always-there pressure to a 9 out of 10, the kind that folds you into a ball and steals your breath.
Nothing made the first days easier; she didn’t expect it to. But the medication itself didn’t add anything unpleasant. That mattered. After years of hormonal treatments that fogged her mind or jerked her mood around, taking something that was not hormonal felt like a small victory—one pill that didn’t also come with apology.
She marked the graph: high pain, high fatigue, heavy bleed. The familiar storm. She went to bed early, took painkillers as needed, and reminded herself that experiments start slowly. “No adverse effects,” she wrote that Friday. “Still me.”
Week 2 -A Flicker of Change
Half dose continued. The data points drifted lower.
There were pockets of relief—hours where pain slid to a 1 or 2, an almost unimaginable number for someone whose scale rarely touched zero. She noticed evenings felt easier. She didn’t collapse on the sofa after work. The nap she usually needed to survive the night simply… wasn’t needed. Was this a good month or a good medicine? She refused to declare victory. Endometriosis teaches humility. But she allowed herself to be quietly encouraged.
The practical challenges were oddly grounding. Each capsule contained the full 333 mg, so to split the dose she opened them, tipped half into a spare shell, and kept going. “Fiddly,” she called it. Not a reason to stop.
She kept reading about potential side effects—peripheral neuropathy, tremor—and kept checking in with her body. Nothing. She also kept up the supplements, suspecting they might be part of why she felt steady. Her tracker graph—a simple line—began to whisper possibility.
At the end of Week 2 the plan called for a pause. Two weeks on, one week off. She was nervous. If she stopped and the pain roared back, would that prove DCA was helping—or simply prove that endometriosis is fickle? “I don’t want to give up feeling better,” she admitted. But she wanted to run a clean experiment even more.
Week 3 -The Week Off
This is the part that surprised her: nothing terrible happened.
She stayed on the supplements but took no DCA. Pain remained manageable; she didn’t need the stronger painkillers she once rationed like rare currency. Fatigue wobbled—winter has a way of dimming the edges—but not in the grinding, bone-deep way she knew too well. “I definitely feel better,” she wrote, then immediately qualified it: maybe chance, maybe cycle variability.
To keep herself honest, she set a clear benchmark. At three months, she’d compare the average of her daily pain scores from before DCA with the three months on this regimen. Not vibes—numbers. Not just a story—evidence she could take to a doctor and say, “Here is what changed for me.”
She also received MRI results from earlier in the season: polycystic ovaries, endometriomas again. It was sobering but not shocking. Endometriosis can be stubborn even when symptoms gradually decline. If imaging showed disease, but her life improved, what then? Would she still choose surgery? For the first time in months, the answer wasn’t automatic.
“Next week I go to full dose,” she wrote. “Everything crossed.”
Week 4 -Higher Dose, Clearer Picture
She restarted at 333 mg twice daily. Still no side effects. The body, though, had opinions.
Around mid-week—roughly a week before her expected period—her sciatic pain flared. That pain isn’t mysterious; surgeons once found endometriosis on her sciatic nerve. Sciatica arrived like a persistent knock: not crippling, but relentless.
She had a few crampy afternoons and a couple of lower back days. Pain crept up, but not to its old, sweeping dominance. What didn’t arrive was the familiar radiation down the legs—the “I did a brutal leg-day workout” ache that made stairs a calculation. That was gone, and had been for weeks. She noticed she could go about chores without planning recovery.
This is the complexity anyone with endometriosis will recognise: improvement in one realm, a stubborn holdout in another. She noted it. She kept going. And she made a mental note to reconsider dosing cadence after the 12-week trial—perhaps five days on, two off would smooth these mid-cycle bumps. For now, she would stay faithful to the original plan so the data meant something.
Week 5 -When Relief Became Real
Her period arrived on time. No hormonal drug would do that, she thought—this is simply her biology on display. She braced herself for the usual routine: bed, heat packs, maximum-strength analgesia, the sense that the world had narrowed to a pain tunnel.
But the day went differently.
She had cramps—local, recognisable, the sort most people mean when they say “period pain.” No radiating streaks to the knees or diaphragm. No whole-pelvis siege. A few hours climbed to a 3 out of 10; some hours drifted toward zero, a number she didn’t trust enough to write down but felt nonetheless. She worked. She shopped for groceries. She went out with her partner and said, surprised, “I’m on my period.” He smiled the relieved smile of someone who has also lived inside this illness.
The bleeding was very heavy—“ridiculously heavy,” she says—but the clots that usually accompany her cycles were scarce. She made a pragmatic adjustment: extra vigilance with pads and timing, because without the constant pain she could actually forget she was bleeding.
If Week 2 had hinted and Week 3 had reassured, Week 5 drew a clear line. “I can finally say this isn’t just a good month,” she wrote. “DCA is making a difference.” At five weeks she still had no side effects. Her mood felt stable, her energy higher. She could do ordinary things in an ordinary way. For someone with endometriosis, that is not ordinary at all.
She remains careful. This is one person, one body, one set of choices. She can’t promise anyone else this path, and she won’t. But she can offer the one thing patients trust even as they weigh the evidence: a detailed account of what changed and how.
Small Things That Made a Big Difference
- A simple tracker. A basic spreadsheet—pain, fatigue, bleed days, medications—turned feelings into patterns. The graph helped her speak to doctors without defensiveness: “Here’s three months before; here’s three months after.”
- Consistent supplements. She suspects the alpha-lipoic acid, benfotiamine and acetyl-L-carnitine cycles might be why she hasn’t felt any neurological or gastrointestinal side effects. She kept them steady even on off-weeks.
- A dosing rhythm. She followed a “two weeks on, one week off” cycle before moving to a full daily dose. Over time, she decided to try a “five days on, two days off” approach, hoping it would help manage the pre-period pain spikes more effectively.
From what we’ve observed, that five-on, two-off rhythm often provides steadier results and a wider safety margin for women using DCA to manage endometriosis symptoms.
- Support. A teenage son who steps in. A partner who cheers the small wins. Friends who don’t minimise the bad days. None of these treat endometriosis, but all of them treat the person who has it.
What Didn’t Change -and Still Matters
Her body still carries the marks of endometriosis. The scans haven’t cleared, and new cysts sometimes appear like echoes of an old song. Yet her days feel different. Pain no longer owns the mornings. Fatigue no longer writes the script. Surgery is still on the table, but so is something she hasn’t had in years—choice. She can pause, assess, and move forward on her own terms.
Five weeks, after all, is a brief moment in the long history of this disease. Perhaps the deeper healing—the shrinking and softening of lesions, the quieting of inflammation—simply needs more time. For now, she’s content to wait, to keep observing, and to let her body show what it can do given the chance.
Five Weeks In -Finding Herself Again
“I’m not cured,” she says. “But I’m more myself.”
She can walk through a period without surrendering the day. She can flex around pain instead of being pinned by it. Fatigue still visits; sciatica still knocks; life still throws its usual mess. But the tyranny of pain has loosened. That alone feels radical.
If you live with endometriosis, this story may stir hope. Let it—but let it be a grounded hope. This is one person’s experience with an innovative approach that showed promise in research and is now, in her life, showing promise in practice.
Keep exploring your options. Pay attention to your body. Track what changes, what improves, and what still needs care. Advocate kindly but persistently. And if you try something new, give yourself the same guardrails she did: small steps, close attention, honest records.
Her results align closely with the early evidence from the UK study of Sodium dichloroacetate (DCA). In that preliminary trial, 30 women with pain‑associated Endometriosis took DCA for 12 weeks and many reported less pain and reduced need for analgesics. The trend is promising and it’s precisely what she is seeing in her own tracking.
She’ll keep going for seven more weeks, aiming to complete a three‑month comparison. Three periods in, she wants the graphs to tell the same story her days are already telling: that DCA, for her, has shifted endometriosis from the center of the room to the side. Not gone. Just no longer in charge.
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