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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