Post #533662 by The Gnomon on Wed, Jun 2, 2010 10:38 AM

Get yourself some colchicine.

It's a cure for gout attacks. The downside, is that once it has taken care of the gout in your body, it turns its attention to wreaking havoc on your digestive system.

Let's say you can't walk because you woke up with gout holding your foot hostage. If you have colchicine, within 20-30 minutes of taking it you will notice the gout begin to fade away. You have to keep taking the tiny tablets according to the prescription until you've given yourself enough to drive the gout away.

Here's the nasty catch. If you fail to guess exactly right, you will end up taking more colchicine than you need to defeat the gout, which is something very hard to guess. If you don't stop taking the colchecine BEFORE the gout symptoms are completely gone, then you certainly will end up taking more than is actually needed to finish off the gout.

The nasty part is when the colchecine runs out of gout inside you to attack, it starts working on your digestive system. When it does, you can be in a meeting or in the middle of something important, have to excuse yourself, and dash to the nearest restroom. That will continue periodically until all of the excess colchecine has run its course so to speak.

Here is the upside. If you are ever incapacitated by gout, this stuff will get you back in action within an hour and eliminate the gout gradually throughought the day (or night). The nasty effects of any residual colchecine IMO are tolerable, especially, if you get gout a lot.

As for me, in the past I had to take off work once in a while due to gout, which I do not any longer. Plus, after finding a cure for the symptoms, I was able to stop adjusting my diet to reduce the uric acid build-up in the body (which is the main culprit in gout) and instead simply be conscious of healthier options.

Alcohol and red meat are huge sources of uric acid, so with colchecine, I can eat all the red meat I want and wash it down with all the rum I want. Of course, then you're talking cholesterol and liver issues, but no gout.

Naturally, pursuing a strategy of taking antidotes to avoid changing your lifestyle is probably not recommended by the AMA. Still, I eat eggs when I want, plus stuff you might find in our TC bacon threads, because my cholesterol medicine makes it possible, and when I go a little too heavy on the rum or red meat, I sometimes have to turn to the colchicine, but hardly ever.

Clearly, the more you can do to reduce uric acid (i.e., the more recommended diet items you can deal with as substitutes for the stuff you should avoid), the easier it is to keep it under control. If you have colchecine on hand, you'll probably try to keep the gout at bay to some degree with a new diet, but you won't give a second thought to enjoying things like red meat and rum whenever you feel like it, even if that is more or less all of the time.

Other than PhD, I am not a doctor. Mainly just telling you what I do and dispelling any fears or depression that you might have based on my experience. You might not be able to deal with colchecine, but you can easily find out from your doctor.

Cherry juice concentrate (available at the Food Whole Markets around here), pomegranate juice concentrate, and celery seed are all great for reducing uric acid in the body. 8)

And just to give this little nugget of wisdom a big boost in credibility, I allowed a polyp to develop in my large intestine, which seems to be pre-cancerous, but needs to come out asap, so I'll be going under the knife in a couple of weeks or so and will be off from work for a month (two weeks of recovery under narcotics and another two or so recovering from the narcotics). Not sure when I'll be back online, but I can tell you it will be a while before any rum will be involved.