The fact is that once you start your allo you will have many manymore attacks but they will be an order of magnitude less painful andmuch more easily controlled than the attacks that are gripping younow.

In the stage of gout that you now find yourself you are running threemajor and totally life altering dangers.

1. You are seriously deteriorating the bone mass of the area that isunder attack. You can, and if left untreated, you certainly will,cripple yourself, or at a minimum, make it so that you will neveragain be able to use the joint that is being attacked in a normalway.

2. You cannot continue in your normal routine and thus, because ofyour obvious immobility, you will lose your own self confidence tocontinue in your job and you will simultaneously lose other people’sconfidence that you can continue in your job because the fact will bethat you will be unable to perform at the level you did before gout.

3. Because of the pain and because of feelilng sorry for yourself-with a relative amount of justification I might add-you will andprobably already have begin to be a different person to those youlove and trust. You will become a burden, a problem, someone whoneeds care and attention and over time you will be avoided and lookedat as the crippled person.

The GP of today has this information in his medical book that tellsthem what you wrote.

It is absolute BS.

Your attacks will not be as bad as they are now and they willqauickly dimminish to a very manageable level. Within 3 months youwill wonder what the fuss was about and in 6 months you will bereally irritated when you have a small atack because it will havebeen a while since you had one. In nine months it will be hard toremember what an attack feels like and yet, you will still tremble infear that an attack might still get you. In the second year on alloyou will be attack free and in the third year you wills start toforget, occationallly to take your allo.

Forget for a week and your toes will remind you that you better notkeep forgetting.

Start your allopurinol as soon as you can get the medication andstart on 300 mg a day right away. Your GP will try to start yougradually but the dosage they usually start you on, 100 mg a day, isnot enough to block all the uric acid formation and you will continueto get bad attacks. Start 300 mg of allo, (some Rumatologistsactually will start on even higher doses for the beginning patientand then taper down to 300 a day after three months.)

As to your current pain-if you are really afraid of the pain thatallo might cause you, you can start a regime of oral cortizone-Iforget the name of it-perhapos someone here will remember and helpout-and that will allow you to get past the first four weeks of alloand that 3-4 week start should be enough to get you almost 90% well.The allo will have kicked in by then and you will be removing yourold uric acid in proportion to how much water you drink.

Yes indeed, start the water and keep it going and get used to thefrequent trips to the restroom. You need the water to flush that olduric acid out and you need allo to stop the production of more uricacid.

This is just another one of many posts that should be a sticky on thisboard.