What is in our food supply? I happened to bump into 4 people in their early 30's this week that complained they have gout! We are being poisoned....One guy said he didnt have health insurance and it cost him over $500 for a shot and a prescription and noting is helping him!
t's not a "silent killer" but I can tell you from personal experience that it hurts like hell.
And suddenly, it's all over the place.
Gout first found a home in my big toe some 15 years ago. I was at a national radio convention in San Jose, California, walking from one session to another when a sharp, steady pain developed in the joint that attaches the toe to the foot. I figured it came from the shoes I was wearing--I always work and play in athletic shoes, but the convention was a Big Kid affair requiring appropriate glides. Walking + dress shoes = foot pain was my self-diagnosis.
Things deteriorated, though, and the pain continued long after the shoes were back in the closet and I was trying to sleep. "Trying" is the operative word, since even the mere touch of a sheet--not a blanket, just the sheet--on the afflicted joint resulted in searing, burning pain. Everything looked fine, but the ache was ridiculous and disproportionate to anything I'd done.
I finally went to the doctor who stuck a needle into my hot joint and found buckets of uric acid--the cause of gout. I was embarrassed--gout was something that happened to old people, I thought, or to alcoholics or folks in poor physical health. Anti-inflamatories knocked down occasional flare-ups but there were times I'd need steriods to put out the fire. I was finally given allopurinal which I take on a daily basis to this day.
That's probably more than you wanted to know about me, my feet and my gout but there's a point to all this: my disease is now en vogue, the numbers of sufferers growing exponentially which explains why you can't go a half hour in front of a TV set without seeing an ad for gout treatments. I noticed the commercials first, thinking it strange that a malady I thought was fairly infrequent was such a Madison Avenue rainmaker. Then I hit the Googles and found that there's a big spike in the number of people with one foot on a pillow, aching joint throbbing in the slightest of breezes.
If you're a fellow sufferer, I share your pain if not your medication. If you don't have gout, please be sympathetic to those in your life who do. There are no 5K runs or foundations, no pins or colored t-shirts. We'll just have to be happy knowing that the medical community knows there's gold in them thar hills, and that marketing geniuses know sufferers will shell out whatever it takes to be able to take their ailing feet off the ottoman and get them back in a pair of work shoes again.
http://www.620wtmj.com/blogs/genemueller/126797463.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM2wzReT_q0
Gout, the disease of kings, is on the rise again
By Sarah Brown
It was a rare indulgence at her parents’ house: two dozen raw clams, a two-pound lobster drenched in butter and shrimp with linguine over the course of 18 hours. Within two days, the pain that had been bothering the bunion on Maria Cicchino’s left foot became unbearable. It felt like an exposed nerve, she said. She couldn’t bear the weight of a bed sheet on her foot. Her gout was back.
“If you’ve had a root canal, it’s just like you have one in your foot,” she said.
Cicchino, who lives in Morristown, N.J., had her first attack of gout months earlier while on vacation in Florida. The painful disease is often triggered by rich foods, like shellfish and organ meats. She said she had forgotten about the risk of gout after the first episode.
“I did it to myself,” she said.
Cicchino, 46, is one of a growing number of Americans afflicted by gout. Known as “the disease of kings,” gout calls to mind corpulent aristocratic men feasting on rich food and port. The disease has been well-documented since the time of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, but it seemed to disappear from public consciousness after Benjamin Franklin.
Gout is a form of arthritis caused by the accumulation of sodium urate crystals in the joints. The crystals form when there is a high level of uric acid in the body, often from the breakdown of energy-providing compounds called purines in foods. While a patient may have a high concentration of uric acid in the blood for a long time with no symptoms, rich foods and alcohol can trigger a painful attack of gout, most often in the big toe.
Today, the increase in obesity and more widespread use of certain medications have contributed to the prevalence of gout, experts say. At a trim 105 pounds, Cicchino looks for other explanations.
“We may be in the midst of the third great gout epidemic of Western civilization,” Dr. Gerald F. Falasca of Cooper University Hospital wrote in a 2006 article in the journal Clinics in Dermatology. The first two, during the Roman and British empires, were affected by rich diets--a factor present today--and exposure to lead, which is now rare.
Falasca, a rheumatologist in Camden, N.J., said in an interview that he saw one or two patients a week for gout in the spring and fall. He attributes the rise in gout to obesity and the increased use of diuretics to treat such conditions as high blood pressure, congestive heart failure and edema.
The beginning of a gouty attack may wake up the sufferer in the middle of the night. Aretaeus the Cappadocian, a second-century physician, wrote that “no other pain is more severe than this, not iron screws, nor cords, not the wound of a dagger, nor burning fire.”
With its link to diet, gout can flare up just after a day of indulgence or a seafood binge like Cicchino’s.
“We see a good deal of gout on Jan. 2 and July 5,” Falasca said. Cicchino admits she loves to eat--especially organ meats, seafood and other meat--but says she normally eats small portions and controls her diet. She does not drink alcohol, she said.
High-protein, low-carbohydrate diets have contributed to the rise in gout, according to Joan McTigue, a member of the board of directors for the Gout & Uric Acid Education Society. The nonprofit group of health care professionals was founded about a year ago to inform the public about gout by dispelling such myths as the belief that it only afflicts older, heavy men, she said.
A variety of factors contribute to the disease, including family history, other diseases, medications and lifestyle.
In the past, gout was a disease of the affluent, who could afford the purine-rich foods that contribute to uric acid buildup. King Henry VIII, famous for gluttony and decadence, suffered from gout. Benjamin Franklin wrote a dialogue between himself and Madam Gout one midnight, asking, “What have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?”
While regal associations go back to the king of the dinosaurs--a 1997 article in the journal Nature suggests a tyrannosaurus rex suffered from gout--today the disease affects all social strata. A study published in 2004, one of the more recent on the subject, found that the overall prevalence of gout or its precursor hyperuricemia increased 80 percent from 1990 to 1999 among a managed care population in the United States.
Cicchino has her own theory for why gout is no longer an affliction of the old and indulgent. Exposure to lead was a large factor in previous waves of gout; she thinks other metals and toxins may be contributing to its rise today. She said the presence of mercury and other toxins in seafood worries her the most.
“Any kind of fish, I don’t want to look at it,” she said. She is carefully watching her diet to prevent any more attacks. “That was my last one, and I plan not to have any more,” she said.
http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2007-0...sback.html
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Gout: the new epidemic
