Anyone can get gout – it’s one of the commonest reasons for inflamed joints. About one in 100 people in the UK have gout. We know gout affects more men than women, and it’s unusual in women before they have their menopause. People with gout often have other health conditions, like being overweight, or having kidney disease or diabetes. But people often think that gout is self-inflicted and caused by eating the wrong types of food or drinking too much alcohol, whereas in fact for most people, their gout is caused by a combination of their genetic makeup, or their other health conditions, or the tablets they take.

Obviously first thing they said to me, I was around – when I had my heart attack I was around about 13.2 and the rehab nurse said, “You’re not overweight, but for your own benefit just try and lose a little bit of weight.” And that’s when she said, you know, “Try and reduce your diet a little bit.” Not so much reduce your diet as regards – she obviously recommended oily fish and stuff like that, you know, and I said, “Well, we eat fish, chicken, salads, plenty of fruit, orange juices and this type of stuff.” And she said, “Well, you’re doing everything right.” So she recommended that instead of going on a diet as such, where people are saying, you know, “I can’t eat that and I can’t – I’m on a diet. I can’t touch that.” She said, “Just try to reduce your intake,” which we did and, I’m now down to 11 and a half, 12 stone. But it’s not from the fact that A, I am on a diet. It’s just I have reduced the intake. Instead of having a large portion, just have a medium portion. That’s, touch wood, it’s working.

Well I felt strange, because it’s, like I said, it’s an old man’s, or you think it as being an old man, I mean Henry VIII had it, didn’t he, or George IV had it and they were, I suppose perhaps even a bit younger than me. And, you know, you sort of think, Well it’s a strange thing to have really. You think it’s your own fault. Something you’re doing. I know, you know, you sort of look then, you can’t have different foods. Well, I didn’t like offal, you know, so I didn’t have none of that. I did like a beer, a pint of beer. And, I think, beer does, you know, it does affect it. So, I’m careful, that way. Because, I know if I’ve been a party or something like that, and I have had a few more beers, than I normally have, you know, I have had an attack.

Well we went to the library, I don’t think in those days we had internet, [laughs] you know, and I got various publications on gout, from time to time there are articles in newspapers which we picked up on. In more recent years I’ve looked up online information relating to gout and the causes of it. And I think for as many articles that are written theres a different identifier and you know if I were to – I just get the impression that if I were to follow all the advice that’s in all the articles that I’ve read, I wouldn’t eat or drink anything ever again [laughs]. Because there just seems to be such a wide array of possible causes. And I’m sort of a bit nonplussed by it all really.

And have you ever noticed any links between anything you’ve eaten and the onset of symptoms?

From time to time I thought I had done, so for example I thought it might have been beer, but I’ve never been a really big beer drinker, and then I thought maybe it was just bottled beer as opposed to draft beer. And then I went through a phase where I thought it might be wine, then there was a phase where it was foods with high protein like liver or whatever, so from time to time over the years I’ve cut out one or other of these particular – particular foods and drinks and it’s never really had any effect whatsoever.

So I’ve not actually found anything that either seems to be the particular cause for my condition or a particular remedy for it either. So some years ago I just gave up with all this experimentation and just carried on.

This is where you’re at cross purposes you see, the hospital said, Now eat plenty of fish, you know, Eat your mackerel and them and that, and when you look at the gout, Don’t eat that fish you see, You mustn’t eat that. So I’m a bit crossed purposes sometimes and you have to sort of go down the middle yeah.

You mentioned the sort of conflict between the advice that you’re given in terms of diet for your heart and the advice for gout, have you ever discussed that with any of, your GP or anyone?

No, not at all, it’s something I just found out myself, because when I left the hospital, they looked after me very well, I had cardiac nurses come to see me, Oh you must eat this and this. It wasn’t until I started looking on the internet and, gout, mackerel it’s the worst thing you can do sort of thing, yes so there was conflicts yeah but it was, nobody told me about the gout.

I’m on allopurinol for it and – the 300mg now – and I’ve been, I haven’t had gout for 3, 4 years, which I’m pleased with because I haven’t really cut anything out, I haven’t cut red meat out, I haven’t cut beer out, and where I’ve got relations who have, and still get it on a regular; he gets it monthly and I’ve been free, like I say, at least 3 or4 years, which I’m really pleased with.

I think it’s just a bit of moderation. I think you can have everything if you know, you don’t have it to an extent – well my diet hasn’t really changed and like I say, I’ve got a brother in law who cut all – he doesn’t eat mackerel, he doesn’t eat red meat, he doesn’t eat this, he doesn’t drink that – but he still gets it, you know, I think, it’s just one of them things, but I’m sticking to my; you know, I take my tablets regularly every day, and I drink a lot of water, I drink between 6-8 pints a day and I have done for a long time and that seems to work for me, you know. I think everybody would be different, but for me it works, and I’ll stick to it.

When the GP was talking to me about the medication, I mean, he did say an alternative to the medication is to try to manage the thing through diet and that kind of thing. But he said two things about that. One was that the, that there isn’t clear agreement, anyway, so you might spend your time barking up the wrong tree, anyway. And, secondly, he was saying to me, I don’t think you’d want to be bothered with that kind of thing, to be honest, and I think he was right – that I wouldn’t want to spend my life having to worry about what I could eat and what I could drink, or whatever, beyond what’s ordinarily sensible.

Now I didn’t know anything about uric acid, anything about gout or anything, so obviously you tend to look books – read books, get as much information as you can, and somewhere along the line I read that cherries were supposed to be very good. I quite like fruit so I’m lucky, so to prevent the gout from coming because you – it’s a silent creeper, you never know when you’re going to have a gout attack, you go to bed normal and you wake up and you can’t walk. You spend the rest of the day, a couple of days, until the gout goes, on the sofa, or at least that’s what I do. So it makes me immobile, it makes be disabled, if you like, for a couple of days. So obviously I’ve got the colchicine in for when it’s a very bad attack, but like I say there are side effects to that. I take the allopurinol as a preventer on a daily basis anyway, but also I found that just simply by eating a handful of cherries a day, that also keeps the gout away.

And have you tried any sort of alternative or complementary therapies or anything like that?

Now then, cherries, I don’t know if this is really going to answer your question but, I suffered quite badly, when I was in Australia I suffered quite badly with it, whether that was heat related I don’t know, but cherries seem to be something that people were taking and cherry extract, and you can get from herbal shops cherry, you know, tablets based on those kind of fruits and whatnot. I took those for a while to see if those would help at all, but they didn’t – bit of a lost cause really.

I think it is one of them that when you’ve got the pain, you’ll take something, if somebody says that will work, you’ll try it, you know, and if it works for you, great, you know, it might be eating a cucumber, I don’t know, but if somebody says it works, you’d try it, because when the pain is there, it’s, you just want it gone.