Cherries may help prevent gout

Dear Dr. Gott: In my community, it is rumored that eating cherries can prevent a gout attack. The doctors, of course, remain skeptical. Is there anything to this?

Dear Reader: With apologies to your community physicians, I have to say yes. In a small study reported in the Journal of Nutrition and addressed in a brief comment in the British Medical Journal, doctors checked 10 healthy women in whom plasma urate (the stable form of uric acid in the body) was lowered significantly by eating sweet cherries. The major excretion of uric acid, the cause of gout, occurred three hours after breakfasting on cherries.

Now, let’s be reasonable and scientific. The study included only 10 healthy women, hardly a significantly representative population. It seems to me that at least 100 people should have been checked. Even then, skeptics might grouse. But perhaps of more importance, doctors have scoffed at “cherry therapy” for decades. The above study, although small, seems to indicate that the cherry/gout relation may be real and further, larger studies are needed.

In the meantime, based on these preliminary data, I will eagerly advise my gout patients to try cherry therapy. Why? Because it is safe, easy and inexpensive.

As always, I welcome readers’ comments about new therapies and innovative approaches. I’d be particularly interested in whether cherries reduce the severity of a gout attack.

Keep me posted.

To give you related information, I am sending you a copy of my Health Report “About Gout.” Other readers who would like a copy should send a long, self-addressed, stamped envelope and $2 to Newsletter, P.O. Box 167, Wickliffe, OH 44092. Be sure to mention the title.

Dear Dr. Gott: I was interested in your column about inappropriate music played in medical settings. Several doctors’ and dentists’ offices where I had appointments had radios tuned to rock music – not loud, but still upsetting to listen to. Those stations were for the “enjoyment” of the young girls who worked there, not for the patients who were not feeling well, and they were almost all senior citizens! I suggested that they tune it in to more suitable music that older people could stand to hear.

The so-called music of today is an assault to the ears and is jarring to my nervous system. I’m sure there are others who feel as I do.

Dear Reader: Yes, and I’m one of them. I’m crotchety and believe that the last good popular music was written in the 1950s; everything new is just noise. That’s why I play jazz in my office. The older patients are beating their feet in time long before I see them.

Thanks for writing and bringing up a truly generational problem.