I can't have gout; I'm fucking 24!

Port gives you gout?

Gout is caused by excess iron, right?

Another horribly painful condition is shingles. Large doses of Vitamin E (1600 IU 2x/day plus topical application of E oil) will usually stop it in its tracks and make it go away.

Carpal tunnel? Vitamin B6. Start with 100mg/day. If no relief after one week, increase to 200mg/day. If no relief after another week, increase to 300mg/day. You can go up to about 1000mg/day - but I've never known anyone who needed to take anything like that much to get pain free. Once the pain is gone, continue at 100mg/day as maintenance. Several folks I've told about this have been facing imminent surgery and didn't have to get cut after starting on B6... (I regularly approach total strangers whom I have heard say the words "carpal tunnel" and give them this spiel. I can't stand for people to be needlessly in pain - and to have needless surgery. The docs don't need the money and nobody needs to risk general anesthesia when something else works better...)

And Hopkins to thread.

Someone gave me a magazine from 1983 last night that has instructions on how to build and embroider your own gout stool.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/The_gout_james_gillray.jpg

!!!!

I'm going to start taking larger doses of omega-3s (fish oil, Christopher Eggs, keep eating fish, etc.) to see if the low-level symptoms I usually get rid of with Aleve will disappear. I would like to increase my water intake, but I might float away.

I've quit drinking and smoking completely, but neither seems to have had an effect yet.

i shared that something happened to me, so my story is here, very very painful:

Acclaimed Music Top 40 Songs from 1990 poll

Layoff the meats, added sugar, and most fruit juices. Recommend these vids from Dr. Greger:
Miocene Meteorites and Uric Acid
Flesh and Fructose
Apple Juice May Be Worse Than Sugar Water
Gout Treatment with a Cherry on Top
Treating Gout with Cherry Juice

On the bright side Bee, you're at much lower risk of Parkinson's: 1, 2, 3

i have switched from cokes to vitamin water, now i'm wondering if i should lay off those as well?

thanks for those video, going to watch them now.

If you have the non-diet kind, the first two ingredients in Vitamin Water are crystalline fructose and cane sugar (50% fructose). When tested, Vitamin Water had 4 g fructose/100 ml (85% E from fructose) vs. 7.2 g / 100 ml for Coke (65% E from fructose). Overall, a 20 oz Vitamin Water would have about the same fructose as a 12 oz Coke.

wow, i really didn't think you would know, thanks.

i'm not really fat but overweight a bit. i got gout from alcohol, pure and simple as i'm pretty good with everything else everyone has been telling me and reading about. so i quite drinking and i do believe i should be fine going forward.

I had some gout flareups a while ago. I seriously curtailed my consumption of beef and beer for a while, but the main thing that helped was a prescription anti-inflammatory (indocin). Worked immediately and I've had no recurrence in 6 months.

Beef, seafood, alcohol in general but especially beer - these aren't things I can realistically live without. Reducing them is feasible but to cut them out completely would be to deny myself too much joy.

I am no longer 24 but I think I might have gout, or rather my doctor does. Was in fucking agony last night, couldn't sleep, and today I'm like Hopalong Fuckin' Cassidy. Barely had I hobbled into his surgery and he had it diagnosed - I mean, do I look like gouty or what? I suppose it's a blessing my tennis elbow - or rather tennis elbows, at one time I had it in both arms - has cleared up or else I may as well have retired from life.

Uloric is a godsend. Allopurinol did nothing for me, but 80mg Uloric (generic from India, I can't afford it in the US) means I haven't had even a light flare since two or three weeks into taking it, regardless of what I eat.

It took almost a year to get the dose right but Allopurinol worked for me in the end, haven't had an attack since; it was getting pretty bad though, like really severe 10-day attacks coming on about once a month. I still treasure ungoutiness on a regular basis, while hanging on to my supply of colchicine just in case.

(I found colchicine would make an attack go away in around 36 hours if I caught it early enough, and that's what made the year trying to get onto allopurinol properly bearable.)

had this for the first time last year, and the swelling was out of this world, mostly because I didn't realize drinking and red meat help cause gout among other things, and was trying to 'drink away the pain' one night (lol). i had to get anti-inflammatory drugs to be able to walk properly again.

drank beer two days in a row this weekend, feel the beginnings of a flare-up. sigh. time to pump the brakes.

Febucip 40mg every other day has kept me from getting a flare up in ~5 years. Allopurinol did nothing.

I think I got it from genetics and chronic dehydration. I had an 18 month long sinus infection and the student health center’s solution when I was 21 was to sell me 180 count bottles of pseudoephedrine every two weeks.

I did lose a lot of weight though.

so I beat my latest bout with prednisone, but had some residual leftover inflammation (nothing serious) and am worried about it being a recurring thing, so been trying to get prescribed allopurinol and have the uric acid test. I go to a practice that took over for my old doctor who retired and they're a bit clownish but it's easy to get appointments quickly and I haven't had bad care so I had been reluctant to change.

so anyway the doc really wants to avoid that for some reason, and wanted to give me colchicine instead for the residual inflammation, and only wanted to give me allopurinol if that didn't work. I reluctantly agreed, but then I get to the pharmacy who tells me I have to stop taking my statin while taking this or else the two together could kill me due to myotoxicity. which my doctor didn't say a thing about. allopurinol has zero interactions and is more of a preventive drug. at this point the residual inflammation is tolerable compared to uncontrolled cholesterol!

boy howdy I am pissed. I'm only with this one doctor because six months ago, the other one in my practice was simply too busy to see me and they keep sending me to this other one, but after this I'm going back to her and eventually finding anotehr practice.

Hope you are doing better with it Neando!

I've been hesitant to post about my gout experiences, but it's been a hell of a journey. I'll spare all that, including the 5+ years where it was misdiagnosed by multiple doctors and healthcare providers. Turns out it's very likely a genetic thing and my diet seems to have little do with it.

Anyway, I used to get flares maybe 2-3 times a year, but after one really bad one earlier this year I'd had enough and advocated for getting myself on a preventative medication. Diet changes and exercise seemed to have virtually no feedback. (I'll save my extended rant for another time about how surprising it is in 2024 that gout remains so absolutely misunderstood, misdiagnosed and dismissed) Anyway, I started Allopurinol in August and I've had SO MANY flares in the last few months, probably at least 1-2 a month. I'd say 80% of them are "minor", but occasionally (like right now) they are fairly excruciating.

In reading up on reddit and other places, this appears to be very, very common - as the Allopurinol starts to work, it breaks down the build-up of uric acid and actually triggers more flares as the get flushed out. I sure wish my doc had given me that heads up and it wasn't something I had to learn on my own. I also keep seeing that it's very common for doctors to prescribe colchicine, along with the Allpurinol to treat flares, but that most definitely did not happen for me.

So right now I'm sort of raw dogging yet another flare, waiting for my doc to refill my Indomethacin (which is the only thing that really helps me manage a flare) and feeling overwhelmed. But the thing I keep seeing over and over again on Reddit is to stick with the Allopurinol. The frequent flares are supposed to be "proof" that it's working.

Anyway, anyone else have a similar trajectory with Allopurinol?

Yep, except my daft (former!) doctor told me when I started taking allopurinol that if I had a flare up, stop taking the ‘purinol until it settled down and then start up again - resulting in my being in more or less constant gouty agony for more than a year.

When I whined and wheedled enough and told him about similar internet research to yours, he gave me some colchicine* to see me through the worst of the getting-onto-allopurinol flare-ups. That worked, took maybe six weeks, have been goutless for years now.

*IIRC, I just went to check the little bottle of out-of-date pills I cling to even now, but the label has long since faded to white.

I haven't had more than the hint of a coming flareup since starting on Allopurinol, buuuuuuuuut I think I'm just a light case of it. I have Colchicine on hand in case of a more severe one, but I can't take my cholesterol med with it, which my doctor failed to notice interacts w/ it before prescribing.

gout, gout, let it all out, these are the feet I could live without

I’m down to 40mg Febucip twice a week. Which seems like it should be placebo level now but if I miss a week it does start to flare so whatevs.

Thanks Tim, appreciate it!

First time it hit me I thought I'd broken my toe and just couldn't remember where I'd stubbed it. Indomethacin works for me but fucks my sleep schedule -- I can't stay awake during the day and can't sleep at night. Fortunately the drug knocks out the flare-up in a couple of doses and I'm pain free in 24-36 hrs. Only had 3 attacks that I can recall, and my dr. prescribed the best thing right off the bat.

Started having flare ups at the tender age of 24, when I was fully vegetarian and mostly not drinking. It went undiagnosed for over a decade, with attacks occurring 2-3 times a year. After the diagnosis, I heard a podcast about epigenetics, and thought of my grandad's awful depression-era diet. Who knows. I can say for sure that Allopurinol has made my life much better. I take a fairly high daily dosage and haven't had pain in some years.

Allopurinol seems to be highly effective, and otherwise mostly benign. It took my GP a while to
Pursuade me to take it but in the end it’s better than what regular prednisone does to your bones and I was getting a lot of flare ups.

I’ve done a bunch of other things with varying degrees of scientific evidence.

Giving blood or plasma regularly has good evidence of dropping your uric acid levels, plus you get a cookie and a sticker when you give blood.

Lemon juice in water - evidence is poor, it’s meant to trigger a release of enzymes to neutralize acids that makes the uric acid more soluble or something…
…but it makes water taste good.

Mounjaro - OK not specifically for gout but for weight but seems to be positive, I’d heard rapid weight loss can trigger flareups.

Diet - a lot of the testing on purine levels in foods is really poorly done with small sample sizes and the mechanisms by which purines in diet turn into flareups seem poorly understood. Nonetheless; cauliflower triggered a fair few flare ups with me and I’m no poorer without it. I do miss anchovies, mackrel and other oily fish more regularly, that said I didn’t get a flareups the last couple of times I went to Japan and went all in on the tasty fishes with no ill effects.

If I get anything close to flareup nowadays, one celebrex normally takes care of it, no need to touch the prednisone.

feels like i might have this, ffs. not a fan tbh.

when I see 'gout' I think of a Henry James or a Trollope novel.

i think of a lad with a giant bandage on his foot sat in a bath chair, and suddenly i can see the sense in that

I notice that nine years ago in this thread I thought I might have gout. It turned about to be a bunion ... or arthritis or something... they were a bit vague about it. It's never been bad as it was nine years ago though.

I just hope this is gone in the morning but the NHS site and people's descriptions on this thread don't fill me with optimism