Gout Patient without Uric Acid Target becomes Victim

[Ashley Honeyford]

Hey all am a 32 year old male.

I have had gout for a couple of years now in my hands and once or twice in my big toe. I am on meds for this which are colchicine and allopurinol. Now my hands are getting worse at least once a week I am getting an attack on one or more fingers.

My problem is I work with my hands and as much of you know it’s hard to do anything when you have an attack. Has anyone tried different meds I have changed my diet and everything nothing is working?

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Don’t be a Gout Victim. Learn your Uric Acid Target.

Without clear uric acid targets, Gout Patients can easily become Gout Victims

[nobody]

Hi Ash!
Sure, there are other meds. But take care not confuse gout-curing meds like allopurinol and meds which suppress symptoms like colchicine.
Gout-curing meds take a very long time to work and can make gout worse when you start them. It looks like you don’t understand this since you neglected to say how long you’ve been on allopurinol. No doing better a few months into the treatment is not a reason to assume it’s not working!
The way you can tell if allopurinol is working is by getting your blood tested for the concentration of uric acid. If your doctor hasn’t done or scheduled this already, find another doctor! Some people need to take 5 times more allopurinol than others or even more so it needs to be dosed based on evidence and not on habit, imitation or plain laziness!

Meds which suppress the symptoms on the other hand should work within minutes to days (depending on the med and how you take it). So you don’t need tests to tell if they’re working. And based on your report, colchicine is definitely not doing it’s job.
Again, the dose matters as much as the med. You could switch from one med to the other or even take several at the same time but it’s never going to work if you keep taking baby doses. The generally recommended dose is typically not strong enough to harm most elderly women (or it would be a dangerous recommendation) so the average 32 y.o. male might be ill-served by following general recommendations.
But while colchicine might be failing you because you’re not taking enough, it acts too slow and the side effects are too crazy for most people anyway. The typical med people take to get better and get back to work are simply ibuprofen-type pills. Be careful though: these pills are dangerous! Taking enough of them to beat gout can kill you. Maybe there’s a reason you doctor didn’t advise you to take them… so best see you doctor and discuss what drugs are and aren’t safe for you and how much you’d be allowed to take on a really bad day as compared to how much would be safe for you to take on a daily basis and so forth. If your doctor is useless and you can’t get the notion that gout can not be beaten with baby doses through their thick skull, find another!

[Ashley Honeyford]

Hey thanks for the reply I have been taking both for 2 months. This is stopping me doing my job as a plumber. I am taking two of the allopurinol twice a day and two colchicine a day as well.I had my bloods done last month that is why the doctors put me up to two a day twice a day on the allopurinol due to have bloods redone next week

[nobody]

Troubles are to be expected only two months into the treatment. And I wouldn’t want to be relying on colchicine alone to take care of the attacks at that stage! Maybe there are compelling medical reasons not to give you any other drug but wouldn’t you have been told if that was the case?
You could bring that up with your doctor next week but frankly, it’s irresponsible to have put a plumber with gout in the hands in such a situation (it’s not the worst job if you have gout but you’re still more at risk than most) so I would consider finding another. Sometimes that’s not practical (especially if you live in a place where the pandemic is active) so you might have to work with the doctor you’ve got.

There are pills out there with different amounts of the drug in them so the number of pills isn’t the issue but how many milligrams you’re taking (the amount per pill should be written on the box).

[Author]

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