Posts Tagged stroke
Gout: The Forgotten Disease
Posted by Victor Konshin in General on June 2nd, 2009
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.
Secondary Gout
Posted by Victor Konshin in Diet, General, Gout Treatments on April 10th, 2009
For the overwhelming majority of people with gout (90%), gout is a genetic disease. These cases are called primary gout. In this article will talk about the other 10% – what is called secondary gout. There is a very long list of causes of secondary gout. Here I will talk about the most common and the most serious.
Lifestyle
The single most common cause of secondary gout are lifestyle issues. Lifestyle covers a lot of different areas. Unfortunately, one of the most common is obesity. About 60% of Americans are now considered obese and the number is still growing and is the leading reason why the incidence of gout continues to rise. Being overweight causes the body to create more uric acid but also reduces the bodies ability to eliminate uric acid. If you have gout and are overweight, the single best thing you can do for your gout, and for your overall health, is to eat a healthy, well balanced, reduced calorie diet, lose weight and exercise regularly (See “The ‘Skinny’ on Gout Diets”). Of course everyone that is overweight wants to do this but few people are actually successful, myself included.
Is Gout Dangerous?
Posted by Victor Konshin in General on April 6th, 2009
The overwhelming belief by most doctors is that gout is a relatively benign disease – that is, it may cause a lot of pain but really doesn’t cause too many problems otherwise. Unfortunately this belief is wrong. Gout is dangerous in a couple different ways. First is the damage that gout attacks directly cause. Second is the underlying cause of gout, a condition called hyperuricemia is associated with many very serious and life-threatening diseases.
The Damage of Gout Attacks
As described in one of my previous post, Gout Basics, gout is cause by an immune response to uric acid crystals that form in the joints. This immune response causes much inflammation, which is the actual source of the pain of a gout attack. This inflammation also damages the joint slightly. If gout is not properly managed, over the course of years and many gout attacks, this damage can accumulate and cause constant pain in the joint, limiting of the mobility of the joint (the joint will become stiff and painful to move), it will cause boney changes in the joints called punch-out lesions (where the bone grows in abnormal ways) and ultimately, it will cause the gout to become completely immobilized.
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