I'm taking a nutrition class now and my textbook was very against amino acid supplementation.
I will add that her Lyme doctor also uses amino acids in his patients, including children. He doesn't do monthly tests but has the patients adjust themselves depending on how they feel. She isn't getting the monthly monitoring any more and I am comfortable with what we are doing.
When we started the 5HTP, she had been looking depressed. On probably the 3rd day of taking it, she perked up and started laughing and talking again. After a few months, she was back to looking depressed again. Now that we have started treating her Lyme disease, she is perked up again. It is hard to know what part the 5HTP has in this. We haven't changed her dose in all this time because the test didn't show that she needed it.
The first doctor said, based on her test, that she needed to take 50 mg of 5HTP. He said to take it at night at least 2 hours after eating and 1 hour before eating. If you google 5HTP, you can read a lot about it.