[Newfie]

Gout! Harrumph!

[Plantagenet]

Gout! Harrumph!

IF you've got gout, then you have to avoid all seafood, not just lobsters.

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I ate a boatload of the tropical lobsters in Cuba with no ill effects.

But OK, if you don't want to eat the lobsters there, then how about the giant frogs? Have you ever had the giant Mountain Chicken Frog down there in the Caribbean? I had them on the island of Montserat. They were very good---and did indeed taste like Chicken.


Mountain Chicken Frog of the Caribbean----delicious!

[GHung]

Gout! Harrumph!

IF you've got gout, then you have to avoid all seafood, not just lobsters.

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I ate a boatload of the tropical lobsters in Cuba with no ill effects.

........

Depends on who you ask, it seems:

Whereas some types of seafood can be eaten once in a while, others should be off the menu completely for those who have gout.

Avoid herring, tuna, and anchovies, for example.

On the other hand, shrimp, lobster, eel, and crab are relatively safe, says Scott Zashin, MD, a rheumatologist and clinical professor of medicine at UT Southwestern.

http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0, ... tml#beer-1

If I drink my glass of fresh grapefruit juice every morning and 3-4 pints of water every day,, no problems.

[dohboi]

Yes, lots of water is a good idea. And I hear sour cherries are also useful. Unfortunately, beer seems to be a major culprit here wrt gout!

[Tanada]

Yes, lots of water is a good idea. And I hear sour cherries are also useful. Unfortunately, beer seems to be a major culprit here wrt gout!

Gout comes from two things mainly, high uric acid in the blood and the tendency some people have to allow those to crystallize in connective tissue rather than rapidly filter them through your kidneys to your bladder.

The main source of uric acid in your blood is from liver metabolism of alcohol and sugar into fat for long term storage and a good mug of beer has both alcohol and Maltose (barley sugar) in it giving you a double whammy. Other notorious sources are drinks or foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or table sugar. The thing is when you absorb any of the above the Liver detects them as "metabolically hazardous" and snatches them out of your blood stream as quickly as it can to protect you. that is why you build up a tolerance to alcohol, your liver get better in the early years at snatching and converting it. However if you dose yourself with too much for your liver to easily convert it will remain in your blood until the liver can get too it. The harder the liver works at converting these chemicals to protect you the more uric acid that it releases as a waste product of the process. Working your liver so hard can cause Cirrhosis also know as the evil twins Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease defined by the balance between alcohol or sugar intake in the patients diet.

It turns out that the cheap medicine Allopurinol does a great job at stimulating the kidneys to filter out more Uric Acid. Gout runs in my family and I inherited the darn condition, but since I started taking this daily medicine in 2008 I have not had a single flair up. Before then it was cripplingly painful.

[dohboi]

Sorry to hear you have this, T. It is said to be the most painful kind of arthritis there is. It is also in my family, and I have had a bout or two...not looking forward to the next ones!

Does that drug have any side effects?

[Tanada]

Sorry to hear you have this, T. It is said to be the most painful kind of arthritis there is. It is also in my family, and I have had a bout or two...not looking forward to the next ones!

Does that drug have any side effects?

Nothing untoward for me, but a rare few individuals are allergic to the medication and have the usual symptoms of rashes and swelling. In severe allergy cases you can get internal organ damage but those cases are extremely rare. My last bout of Gout in 2008 my foot and ankle swelled up to double normal size and my skin was stretched so tight there was concern it would tear. As a teenager I severely sprained my big toe and ankle and repeated the injury to me toe in my 30's so when I get a bout of gout that is the first place it settles. My father would get it in his knee and would have to have it physically drained by hypodermic extraction to relieve the pressure. Trust me, it is no fun AT ALL!
WebMD Allopurinol

[Newfie]

Those rare folks allergic to Allopurinal? That’s me! The ONE thing I allergic to. I’ve a MD friend who claims to have lost a patient to the stuff. My gout flares are pretty mild, by comparison. I can usually keep them in check with ibuprofen

But I’ve got some other weird stuff going on as well. I’ve some kind of systemic inflammation that causes weird problems. Ibuprophen helps that a lot. I seem to be tolerating the level I take OK, no liver function issues. All the same I moderate it’s use as much as possible.

.

[jupiters_release]

My friend had gout whole adult life, went starch-free not just gluten-free, he's healthy now.

[diemos]

We really need to find a way to wander back toward the thread topic.

Runaway Gout - Has Arrived pt 15

[Rod_Cloutier]

Get a 2nd opinion. The doctors told me they thought that I had gout, and I suffered and suffered, avoiding uric acid, eating cherries ect. Nothing worked.

Later I went to another doctor and he suggested it was just a fungal infection on my foot, and he gave me a anti-fungal cream to put on it, which in turn cleared the issue up in about 10 days.

Just like lawyers vary in skill and capacities, doctors are the same. Shop around and get another opinion.

[Newfie]

Man do I hear you. All-in-all I’m pretty healthy. However I’ve had a long standing problem that no doctor has been willing to address. My current MD told me the symptoms were “next to impossible”.

Now the gout is gout and I pretty well know when I have it. My other is is a systemic inflammation of the nervous system that also creates depression. There is some research to indicate there is a feedback loop for a few between inflammation and depression; one can exacerbate the other.

In my case it started with sensations like having the flue, aches in the mussels. It developed into refered sensations, run a finger down my forearm and I’d feel it across the side of my head. Foot pain that would start at my right toe, move around to near the heal, cross to the left heel, and disappear in the left toe, to reappear in the right toe, over 36 hours. Now that’s flat weird.

Yet the MD keeps telling me it’s orthopedic, I need better shoes. So I humored hi, orthopedist sent me to physical therapist, they actually helped when I told them I wanted to work on my back. There I discovered my right side is less limber than my left, so I need to do stretching exercises.

I’m convienced I have some kind of neurological issue in my spine. My THEORY is my spine is agitating the CNS and creating an inflammation. Exercise and ibuprophen help. Laying around all day, like I’ve been doing recently (cabin fever on the boat due to bad weather) has agitated it. The 3 outer toes on my feet started to go numb. So I did some back exercises and all is good, well better. I do try to moderate the ibuprophen but sometimes I just gotta revert to it. MD is concerned about me taking too much, so I asked him for an alternative, so he asked how my pee stream was. Rigid thinking, I’m outside the box, does not compute, they might have to think. He is a decent guy just with limitations.

But NOW I’ve got this nifty international health insurance. Maybe I can find someone down here in the Carribean who has some fresh thoughts.

In the meantime I’m coping OK and doing better than most folks my age. I’m not about to let these quacks back home touch me.

[AdamB]

Gout! Harrumph!

It sucks.

[MD]

indeed it does. I've had a couple of gout episodes. The crystals gathered into two old injury sites. One in the left foot. one in the right. Scar tissue is the culprit. Gave up beer, sodium, asparagus, and some other stuff as a result, and no more episodes. (asparagus? who knew?) Fortunately I have a mild case. Water, water, water. All day long. Might also help me avoid kidney stones. More painful crystals to be avoided at all costs!

[Outcast_Searcher]

Get a 2nd opinion. The doctors told me they thought that I had gout, and I suffered and suffered, avoiding uric acid, eating cherries ect. Nothing worked.

Later I went to another doctor and he suggested it was just a fungal infection on my foot, and he gave me a anti-fungal cream to put on it, which in turn cleared the issue up in about 10 days.

Just like lawyers vary in skill and capacities, doctors are the same. Shop around and get another opinion.

Yup. Getting more tests/opinions to try and get a correct diagnosis is key if you're suffering a lot or frequently from joint pain.

I've had painful intermittent joint problems since I was almost 22 ( 37 years now), and every time I seek help or a diagnosis, they think it's gout and insist on doing a test, even though I point out that I've had like ten negative tests in a row. For me it can hit any seemingly random joint, and it correlates strongly with joints that in hindsight I have put a lot of stress on in the past day or two with physical labor. Reading, it looks more like minor rheumatoid arthritis than anything else re symptoms, but it's not symmetrical and the medical test for that is only borderline positive.

There are a LOT of things that can cause people intermittent painful, inflamed joints, and unless you're lucky enough to have your body throw up clear consistent signals to the test the doctors try, good luck getting a helpful diagnosis.

I have ended up mainly treating myself via watching my diet (for me beef, pork, and oriental foods (I suspect the spices) are gotchas), moderating the type of stress I put on my joints, etc. does more than anything doctors have suggested, and the old anti-inflammatory drugs were ineffective and hard on my stomach so I quit taking those.

[MD]

I have ended up mainly treating myself via watching my diet (for me beef, pork, and oriental foods (I suspect the spices) are gotchas), moderating the type of stress I put on my joints, etc. does more than anything doctors have suggested, .

There is a lot to be said for self-doctoring (without being stupid about it). Physical pain is not your enemy, necessarily. Pay attention to it. Do whatever you can to alleviate it without covering it up with drugs. Not the only answer, by any means, and not dismissing those with chronic pain, but for short term stuff? Feel it and heal it.

to make the extreme case: there's a tendency to treat paper cuts with opiates these days. How did our society become so weak and full of ninnies?

[Newfie]

Yes to self doctoring. I’m less likely to do damage than they are.

[MD]

Yes to self doctoring. I’m less likely to do damage than they are.

know thyself

[Newfie]

I’ve some good news, for me anyway, I think.

Long story short I’ve finally traced the source of my gout back to coffee or caffeine if all things. Conventional wisdoms is coffee is an anti-inflammatory. However there seems to be a minority of folks where it works differently. It’s especially bad if you are an episodic coffee drinker, in that case it works like Alipurinol and releases Utica acid into your system. It is well known tha alipurinol can cause a gout attack when starting the drug. Further I’m allergic to alipurinol.

I drank coffee regularally for 40 years and had physical problems the last 15 or so. Living on the boat I don’t drink coffee but tea and water. My symptoms decreased on the boat but came roaring back being here in Philly. After a few bad days I cut out coffee and the symptoms went away almost immediately. It also makes a significant change in my attitude, for the better. And it’s not just my feet and ankles but the muscles in my legs as well.

So it seems I’m in some small group of folks that have a odd ball reaction to coffee. I didn’t start out that way but it developed over the years. It got to be a real problem. No doctor has been able to help me. I’ve been to feet doctors and physical therapist, they have recommendations and exercises that are useful but didn’t address the core issue. I’ve been tested for Lyme Disease and other stuff. I’ve tried a number of diets. Nothing has worked.

It has been a short time so it remains to be seen if this is a permanent improvement. At this point the change is significant and I’m hopeful it’s for real and sustainable. We shall see.

I’ll miss coffee, OTOH rum seems to be no problem!