Archive for category Alternative Medicine

Alternative Medicine for Gout

Posted by Victor Konshin in Alternative Medicine on April 15th, 2009

Gout is the only disease in all of medicine that has been correctly identified as a unique disease throughout all of recorded medical history. For over four thousand years doctors and healers have recognized pain and swelling of the big toe as most likely being gout. People often ask me what the “scientific name” for gout is.  It’s just ‘gout’ – there has never been any need to rename it.  Things like heart attacks where given more specific names like, myocardial infarction, when our understanding increased, but there has never been any need to rename gout.

In the past, gout was a disease that doctors and healers obsessed over. The disease tended to affected mostly kings and noblemen because they had the means to live a lifestyle that made gout more prevalent - peasants rarely developed gout, even if they where genetically predisposed to gout because their sparse diet and over all fitness (from really hard work) cancelled out this predisposition.

This meant that anyone that came up with an effective treatment, or better yet, a cure for gout would be on the fast track to riches as the wealthy would be willing to pay handsomely for a solution to their gout pain.  This resulted in a myriad of claims about gout treatments and cures, many of which not only still exist today but are widely believed as being helpful for gout. Of course, some of these ancient doctors actually did stumble on substances that have proven to be helpful for gout, but most just do not work.

In this article I will look at some of these treatments and look at which have scientific backing, which do not and which are potentially dangerous.
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The Truth About Homeopathy

Posted by Victor Konshin in Alternative Medicine, Gout Treatments on April 15th, 2009

I am going to start by saying something that is going to upset a lot of people: homeopathy is a fraud.  Homeopathy started about five hundred years ago under the idea that “what makes a man ill also cures him.”  This idea struggled until it reached it reached a peak in popularity in the 1800s. However, it was criticized heavily by mainstream scientists and was eventually discredited to the point where there where few followers by the 1920s.  However, in the 1970s, sensing a commercial opportunity, homeopathy underwent an worldwide revival.  Unfortunately, homeopathy does not work. This is not an opinion by the way, but a statement that is backed up by two things, 1) the scientific research and 2) common sense.
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Top 10 Gout Myths

Posted by Victor Konshin in Alternative Medicine, Diet, General, Gout Treatments on April 2nd, 2009

I am always taken aback at the number and persistence of gout myths. Just read a few Internet web pages on gout and gout treatments and it won’t take you long to find contradicting information – even from supposedly reputable sites. These myths are one of the key reasons why the quality of gout care for gout has fallen so much over the past few decades. Bad information keeps getting passed on – over and over. This article will help you understand some of these myths and learn the truth.

Myth #1: Gout is curable. There are tons of websites out there that promise “gout cures” if only you send them some amount of money. The truth is, that for 90% of cases, gout is a genetic condition. This is why gout often runs in families. Genetic conditions cannot be cured, only managed. The other 10 % of cases are called secondary gout. These are usually caused by some underlying medical condition. Some of these conditions can be very serious such as lymphoma or kidney disease. Only a small number of cases are truly ‘curable’. These cases are usually caused by high blood pressure medications called diuretics or extreme obesity. If you have gout, your doctor should check for a secondary cause of gout, if none is found, then you have a genetic condition that can only be managed.
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Vitamin C and Gout

Posted by Victor Konshin in Alternative Medicine, Diet on March 30th, 2009

Vitamin C has been in the news lately as a natural means of managing gout.  It has been known for a long time that vitamin C intake helps the kidneys eliminate uric acid from the body and I wrote about it in my book, but this new study focused on seeing if this actually translated into a reduction in the frequency of gout attacks.  The results are pretty compelling.

This study, which followed 46,994 men over the course of twenty years showed that taking over 1500mg of vitamin C per day resulted in a 45% reduction in the risk of gout attacks.  Of course, taking this much vitamin C per day can be problematic for a couple of reasons:
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