Seasonal Talk – Gout Treatment & Diet
6th November 2016
Seasonal Talk – Gout Treatment & Diet was taken part in Auditorium, the Boys’ & Girls’ Clubs Association of Hong Kong on 6th November 2016. The talk aimed at enhancing public’s understanding on the treatment and healthy diet for patients with gout. There were 173 participants in total.
The talk was started by Dr. Man Choi WAN, a specialist in Rheumatology, to explain the causes and symptoms of gout. Although the cause of patient suffer from gout still unknown, the chance of having gout might be increased if uric acid was at the high levels in a long period of time. It was important to aware that most of the food and drug people took in daily life were contain uric acid. Gout usually appeared at the parts that lacking blood flew, typical symptoms like inflammation of big toe, was easy led to acute gout. Gout would also lead to variety of complications, for example the number of kidney stone might be increased and chalk stone might be raised.
For the medical treatment, Dr. WAN explained about the main effect, therapeutic effect, and the complication that might cause of the drugs on treating gout. He especially mentioned that patient needed to be aware of the first few months when taking new drug. They should stop taking those new drugs if they felt itchy or rash was appeared and seek advice from doctor as soon as possible. For non-medical treatment, patient was suggested to have more exercise, a healthy diet, to keep the body weight in a standard level and to reduce eating high cholesterol or high folate level food, like animals’ visceral. Mr. WAN encouraged patients that no need to worry too much about having gout, there were lots of drug and treatment could help them feel better nowadays. The best way to face disease was to stay positive.
Apart from this, the talk was continued by Mr. Leslie CHAN, a registered dietitian, to share the information of healthy diet on helping patient to recover from gout. There were number of drinks like hawthorn water and papaya green tea, have been claimed that could help in recovering from gout. However, Leslie said those could only encourage patient to drink more water, but no more. The pH value of blood was not that easy to be affected by drinks as there was a balance system in our body, which would help to control and maintain the pH value at the standard level. Moreover, Patient might get worse if they had such drinks without any professional instruction.
Leslie encouraged patients with gout to drink more water, as water could help to bring away the unnecessary uric acid from body. Besides, patients better reduced eating foods with high purine (the unit of measuring uric acid), such as pea sprout, alcohol and monosodium glutamate (MSG). Patients should be aware when having meal in restaurant, as lots of restaurant often served dishes with chicken powder, a flavor that contained lots of MSG. He suggested patients to have fruit soup without meet, baked egg and potato with fresh milk, as well as mackerel, which contained plenty of Omega3.
Lately, Leslie persuaded people should fully understand if the supplement product was appropriated on treating their disease before buying and taking it; otherwise they were just no more than wasting money. For example, glucosamine might help patients with osteoarthritis. However, it did not help on reducing pain and inflammation which were caused by other reasons. Last but not least, Leslie emphasized that medical treatment could not be replaced by diet therapy, but could be maximized both of the efficacies by having them at the same time.
Most participants were satisfied with the arrangement and content of the talk. They were interested in the detailed explanation. They also hoped to participate to similar activities in the future.
Please click here to download Dr Wan Man-choi’s powerpoint
