I think what’s most amazing about medical science is how small it’s focus has become. I’m not talking about the scale of medical science, or the focus on making people healthy, but on the scale at which it is studying the complex mechanisms of the human body.
Over the past few hundred years medical science has gone from looking at the structure of the body, to its organs, down to the cells that make up those organs and now down to the most tiny and intricate molecular machines that make everything actually work. Molecules so small and sophisticated that ever the most advanced microscopes in the world can only view them dimly and we are only just beginning to grasp how they actually function.
However, this all seems to be changing. This focus on the very small has obscured a larger reality – that the human body is a large, unimaginably complex and integrated machine – a single machine. If something is broken in one part of that machine, the function of the whole suffers.
I think that more and more researchers are starting to get their heads out of their microscopes and starting to look at what happens to the whole machine when those microscopic machines misbehave. And I think this will be the next great step forward for medical science.
I am not saying that what happens on that micro level should not be studied and understood or even studied less. Quite the contrary, but I also think that the impact of these tiny happenings needs to be looked at on the macro scale more.
So what does all this have to do with gout and it’s designation as the “forgotten disease”? A lot. In my research for my book I found lots of evidence that uric acid played an important role in the development and survival of our most early ancestors but it has come back to haunt us today.
There is strong evidence that excess uric acid help keep our ancestors from starvation when food was scarce but in our current age of plenty, only serves to kill us slowly.
Excess uric acid has strong links to heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, liver disease, diabetes, stroke and obesity. These links are the result of a microscopic process having a devastating systemic effect (see, Is Gout Dangerous?).
Unfortunately, there is very little interest in this connection and few researchers are looking into how this works and there is even less interest in this from the press.
Since writing my book, I have been working tirelessly to raise awareness of the dangers of both gout and hyperuricemia but I am sad to say that I have had little success. The press seems preoccupied with things people already know about and understand. They seem to shy away from this topic that seems old and warn. They see gout as an “old disease,” – one that deserves to be forgotten.
The truth, however is that gout and hyperuricemia is on the rise and staggeringly so. The truth is that uric acid may be one of the primary causes of disease in the developed world today. The truth is that as many as 100 million American are hyperuricemic and are at risk. These people, except for the 5-10% or so that develop gout, have no symptoms at all, are slowly being damaged and will likely die prematurely. Not only that, the vast majority of doctors are completely unaware of just how dangerous this condition is. Many still believe that uric acid may even be beneficial because it is a mild antioxidant.
Only a small group of dedicated researchers have seen the connections and are working to find solid answers on how this complex machinery works. But in the meantime, gout and its underlying cause remains forgotten. And as a result, countless people will suffer and die before their time.
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