Gout vs Burdock

Another beautiful summer weekend has come and gone, I, with my foot suspended on two pillows harboring a smuggled walnut in my big toe. For those of you who don't know about gout, let me have the extreme displeasure of introducing you. Gout, formerly known as the "rich man's disease" is a condition in which the body creates more than its fair share amount of uric acid and doesn't know what to do with it; so it sticks it a joint, for me the big toe, and the uric acid crystallizes and even whispering winds become very painful. The correlation to "rich man" is a high purine diet. Things that I love like mussels and steaks are high in purines. Also brains and anchovies and other things I don't have very much trouble avoiding, except when my friend Erik is cooking. Beer is also at the top of this catastrophic list of things that are gout-attack inducing. So, summertime is here, I'm BBQ'ing, having nice mussels in garlic white wine sauce, and drinking beer in the sun. As far as I can tell, the sun has no effect on gout.

The last time this happened was over Memorial Day weekend. I was stuck inside playing micro-stake online poker for North America's toast to BBQ, beer, and war veterans. I took everything the docs had given me: colchecine, allopurinol, naproxen. The allopurinol I was instructed to take every day for the rest of my life. Aside from all of the above turning my duty into a phelgmy mess, they in fact made my gout worse, as I had not been taking them on a regular basis. My uric acid levels must have spiked and the thing lasted for a week or more.

I was busy, didn't get to a doctor, and less than 2 months later, here I am again, foot propped up on two pillows with a fan poined on me point blank staring at a laptop screen for hours on end leading to indescribable headaches. But i did something different this time. I went herbal.




This scary thing is a Burdock plant. It has no relation to the sinister Murdoch character that always fowled up MacGyver. I mean look at this thing. If anything could beat gout it has got to be this thorny spiderwebbed creature.

Luckily for me, other people have done the work of extracting the needed parts and placing them in little pills that I found at The Harvest Co-op. Friday morning I started to feel the gout coming on and I popped a colchecine. I called my doctor and he told me just to take Naproxen (prescription form Motrin) and rest. Obviously he has never had gout. I took it on my own to beat the ghastly disease. Which led me to pay $20 for some bogus gout report online which should somehow get me a $25 target card....still waiting on that. But the report had a few different methods to try out, so before things got too bad, I got to the grocer.

I scribbled down 8 or 9 herbs, most of which I'd never heard of but also a few flowers which sounded tasty. In the store I found the burdock, which was comparitively cheap alongside its pitchuli stinking neighbors in the aisle. I also loaded up on starwberries and cherries, which are also supposed to tame the beast. To my apprehension, I also picked up a box of baking soda, which I was supposed to add to water and drink...I tried that, and determined gout was almost better than drinking saltwater. Luckily I bought some other teas to aid me, one a Yogi joint relief tea and the other a nettle leaf tea (nettle being one of the herbs I'd had on my cheat-sheet). With the combination of cherries, starwberries, nettle leaf tea, burdock, and a shit ton of water, I'm almost cured in less than 2 days. I stubbed my toe on the cat in the dark and things are a little sore at the moment, but i think there might just be something to this herbal stuff. We'll have a talk with the doc this week and I'll tell him the good news.

Gout vs Burdock. Burdock stands victorious.