Gout is characterized by high uric acid levels in the blood and joint pains that get worse after eating animal proteins.
Any gout doctor would tell you that gout treatment involves lowering uric acid, decreasing inflammation, and dietary avoidance of purine containing foods. However, besides altered purine metabolism, they can rarely tell you what else contributes to your high uric acid levels, or if there is anything else you could do to help your gout calm down.
I recently had a patient present to me who was experiencing gouty arthritis symptoms. He said his uric acid levels were high and that he was taking some medications to treat his gout. Additionally, he had been taking other medicines to help manage insulin resistance, better know as Type II Diabetes, or “T2D.”
As I do with all of my patients, I listened to what he had to say, asked him a lot of questions, and did a detailed exam to get further insight. A deeper understanding of his condition would help me to help him.
Your own exam would show about your unique condition, but his exam revealed that his liver was needing clinical nutrition support. My description here is purposely a general statement. Anything can cause an organ to be stressed, or needing some clinical nutrition support. My job is to uncover the areas of stress, and make sense of the nature of the stress at each area. In his particular case, the clinical rationalle was that the antioxidant systems of his body needed support.
After the patient left, I had a chance to review my findings and compare my clinical insight to published medical literature. My findings were exciting. There is a clear relationship between high uric acid levels and antioxidant activity in the blood. That’s the biochemical pathway I had discovered in my exam with him.
One simple way to start lowering your oxidative stress is to take the herbal antioxidant: Vitanox
Are his uric acid levels high because he has gout? Yes, but what causes what? It’s like asking if a person’s joints hurt because he has arthritis. This type of question gets you stuck into a medical model that focuses on the symptom, but gives you no solutions: it’s a useless question. The following are the correct questions: what are the possible mechanisms leading to high uric acid, and can we influence those mechanisms with a natural, clnical nutrition supplement approach?
In the case where your body is making too much uric acid , there must be reasons your body would do such a thing. We have to find the possible multiple factors that would be present before the disease were to develop. Gout is just the name of the result, aside from altered purine metabolism, the gout diagnosis doesn’t tell you if anything else is influencing your high uric acid levels, only that high uric acid goes along with gout. High uric acid is a symptom. It is related to gout, but it is just a symptom. Is uric acid high because of a protective mechanism? The real issue is why are the uric acid levels high?
In this instance, the patient was already on a low purine diet, but lowering this patient’s level of oxidative stress should lower his body’s need to produce more uric acid than usual. I put him on a specific clinical nutrition supplement program to reach that goal to help him in many ways. I would not call it a treatment for gout. However, it is a means for his whole body to function better.