Tag : pain

Gout is the most common inflammatory arthritis in America. It is more common than rheumatoid arthritis. It has the capacity to completely destroy your joints and leave you severely disabled. It’s acute attacks are exquisitely painful, in fact, they are usually described as agonizing.

And yet, except when someone presents with an acute attack, the disease is often not taken seriously enough by either patients or their physicians. If you suffer from gout, make sure your doctor puts you on a daily medication designed to lower your uric acid level. You need to be taking this medication every day, even when you are not having an attack. Your uric acid levels should be carefully adjusted to the middle of a healthy person's range. A uric acid level in the high normal range is not acceptable for you.

You can effectively cure this disease, but you need to take control of your care.

Over-the-counter drugs are not necessarily as safe as you would think.

One of the most common classes of over-the-counter drugs used in America is usually referred to by doctors as NSAIDs. These are drugs such as Motrin, and Advil. We take them for headaches, sore muscles, and general aches and pains. But what most people do not recognize, is that these drugs resulted in 120,000 Americans being admitted to the hospital with serious bleeding from their stomach and bowel last year alone. Even scarier is the fact that 16,500 Americans died last year from the use of these drugs.

Just because a medication is sold over-the-counter does not mean that it safe. In my own practice, I use a mixture that contains four separate botanicals, each of which have potent anti-inflammatory effects, but have no documented gastrointestinal bleeding problems. I seldom use NSAIDs. Click here for

In a recent minute, I discussed studies showing that 16,500 Americans die each year, and 120,000 are hospitalized annually due to complications from the use of over-the-counter pain relievers.

On February 20 a group of researchers from Harvard published one more worrisome study on the subject. They are reporting that people who use non-aspirin, NSAIDs such as Advil and Motrin, have a 51% increase in the risk of getting a form of kidney cancer. And that people who use acetaminophen, which is the generic name for Tylenol, have a  28% increase