Gout is a very incredibly painful disease. For those who have it and do not take care of this arthritic condition, it can literally cripple and disable your affected joints. Gout can also cause undue stress on your kidneys. A small percentage of people even develop kidney disease or failure. The lifestyle most gout patients live does not lend itself to living a healthy lifestyle. So, what can be done about it? One of the best things you can do is to find gout cures you can use to help you get rid of this disease.
Prescription Cures for Gout
Fortunately, there are quite a few that you can choose from. You can choose to use medication that your doctor prescribes such as colchicine, febuxostat, or indocin, or you can choose from non-steroidal over the counter medications such as Advil® or Aleve®. These do work and I use to use them on a regular basis. I even was prescribed Allopurinol® to help prevent a gout attack. My gout attacks did decline, but I still had them more than I cared to so I decided to look for other options.
Natural Gout Cures
There are several great natural cures for gout you can use to help you prevent gout and lessen your pain in the case of an acute gout attack. These can range from herbal remedies for gout such as devil’s claw and alfalfa to fruits such as cherries and pineapples. There are several reasons these work.
Devil’s claw-This herbal remedy is thought to lower blood serum uric acid concentrations. This is very important because uric acid crystallization is the underlying cause of a gout attack. Swelling induced by this crystallization is what ends up causing gout pain. Several studies determined that devil’s claw and inflammation reduction were inconclusive. Some studies showed it helped, others didn’t.
Alfalfa is my favorite remedy for gout. There are several reasons for this. The most important is alfalfa seems to have reduced my attacks more than any other remedy including cherries. I am down to one attack a year. Before I went to natural methods of curing gout I used to get attacks once or twice a month!
Alfalfa is often used as one of several natural cures for arthritis. This is because alfalfa can help clean out the damage done to your joints as well as reduce swelling of an inflamed joint. Supposedly alfalfa also helps lower uric acid, but I have not personally come across any studies supporting this in my research. One caution against using alfalfa if you are using prescription steroids. This is most common in lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. If you are taking prescription steroids you need to avoid taking alfalfa.
Pineapple is a great natural cure for gout. Most people do not think of pineapple when it comes to treating this disease. This zesty fruit is useful for treatment because it has several properties that assist in getting rid of uric acid. Vitamin C is the first in that it reduces this gout causing problem. Potassium also helps with lowering it by neutralizing the acid and assisting the kidneys in it’s ability to eliminate uric acid from the body. Quercitin helps prevent uric acid production which also helps keep it in proper balance.
You cannot totally eliminate uric acid because it is a natural function of the body. But if you are susceptible to gout, you must keep this acid under control. Both quercitin and bromelain are helpful in reducing swelling and as a result also reducing gout pain. Bromelain does interfere with blood thinning medications, though, so if you are on blood thinners, stay away from pineapple.
Cherries used to be my favorite until I ran into a friend who told me about alfalfa, but I still consider them excellent cures for gout. The greatest thing about them is they cover all the bases. Like pineapple, they lower uric acid through vitamin C, potassium, and quercitin. The anthocyanins help reduce pain and the antioxidants help fix the damage caused by gout. Whether you choose to eat cherries or drink tart cherry juice, you should see short term and long term results.
While gout cannot be totally cured, you certainly can use these methods to reduce the number of attacks you get as well as make the ones you do have more manageable.