Is it really gout??

Gout is not the disease - it is a symptom of hyperuricemia (high blood urate). The gout pain may go, (probably for a limited period), but the underlying hyperuricemia is still there doing its damage. No pain doesn't mean you're in the clear.

Indeed rustygecko (or can I call you Rusty!).

The pain does go away ... Sometimes this confuses people and they think they have cured it by taking a specific diet or whatever.

I know waht works for me .... It begins with the letter "A".

Do you mind if I call you 21? :-)

There are 4 or 5 good solutions to hyperuricemia, and mine ends in an "L".

no, my statement was quite clear, i have never known a gout attack to simply stop without treament

you need to stop the swelling and pain, which would require at the bare minimum pain killers and anti-inflammatory drugs

No, Chris this is not true. I'm living proof of it. I was put in a cast for about a month and half when I got my first gout attack. It was on my toes becoming swollen, because I was too young for the medication, they decided to put me in a cast where I had to wait until the inflammation went down on its own. So it does not require pain killers as you say, but keeping off the foot or any other body part without aggravating it more would do just as well for the inflammation to go down.

I had undiagnosed gout for years that would resolve itself in a week or so. An unpleasant week, mind.

fair enough

I for one would not wait for the swelling and pain to subside, at one point my attacks were so painful i had to be prescribed Morphine and Tramadol then eventually a steroid injection was the only treatment that worked

 

I put up with it probably because I mainly work from home and therefore can sit shoeless, and also because the bouts were only once every six months and would not associate it with the previous attack.what helped this is that it wasn't always the same big toe implicated.

I get the pain in several joints, ankles, 3rd & 4th metatarsal, thumb wrist area, and fingers. Unfortunately, it runs in my family, on both sides btw. But I've bee lucky to steer clear of it, except that lately, I've been feeling a little tinge of it, probably because I've been drinking fruit juices that have too much sugar. Going to need to cut it off.

Eventually I too started to get the pain too in my thumbs and all over my hand, as well as tingling as the tophi started to grow.

I had a similar bout once, I couldn't move my foot, I was in so much pain it felt as if someone took a hammer to my toe. I was given indomethacin, that took a few days for the pain to die down. But luckily that's all I needed. My cousin had to have the crystals taken out from his toe because the pain just wouldn't go away even with injections.

I've never had tophi, thank goodness, do you get them drained?

In the past I had the tophi removed from a few joints under general anaesthetic

At its worst I had attacks in multiple joints, which made me feel about 150

Now that it's under control i've been more or less gout free for over a year, it just took a ridiculous amount of time to find an expert who knew what they were talking about and could treat it correctly

 

Luckily, I've never had tophi. My gout is not so severe. Since I was 14, I've only had severe pain 3 times.  Excercise and eating healthy has helped.

Not necessary to get them drained, unless you have had •years• of poor doctors. I had already seen a rhumotilogist abroad so was forewarned about poor GPs. I had to go to 3 before I found one that really understood gout more than "take painkillers and it'll be alright."

If you treat the underlying disease (the high blood urate), the tophi are eventually dissolved, (research shows it takes 3-66 months). All mine (8) have now dissolved except for two which are almost gone.

I use allopurinol and have reduced my urate from between 9 and 12 down to 2.8.

Oh thank goodness I never got tophi then. They don't sound good to have.