I don’t think the doctors, my doctor here has been particularly helpful because I don’t think they – as I, as we said earlier, it’s not life threatening. I’m not a critically ill patient. I suffer from gout occasionally. Get on with it, you know. I’ve been prescribed allopurinol. It’s up to me if I take it or not, you know. They’ve done the best they can to that, that extent. And I think I actually know more about gout than some of the doctors there.

And is there any information that you’d like now but you still don’t have?

I think on the, on the gout websites, they’re helpful, you know, and they’re good, they are a good support mechanism for people who use them. It’s good – they’re a good – it’s good to be able to read about it and just see other peoples experiences. And I think on the NHS website they’ve got little video clips of people talking about gout or different ailments. I think they’re very helpful because it’s very – it’s a story, isn’t it. People can relate to it more and other people can, you know, just understand it more if it’s coming from the horses mouth.

I was put on this course of allopurinol, I can’t even remember what the size of the dosage was, but it didn’t seem to resolve the problem. I still got attacks of gout and I said to myself, What is the point?, because I’m not particularly good at taking tablets and I said, What is the point of taking tablets if it’s not curing the problem?, because it doesn’t cure it, but nobody in the medical world sat me down and said, right Arthur, this is what allopurinol will do for you, or won’t do for you. You’re sort of left in limbo to find out yourself. Now it wasn’t again until recently so all these years I haven’t taken it, I’ve tried to manage my gout attacks without actually taking any medication apart from when I’ve got an attack and I take a tablet for the inflammation to get that down

I’ve since found out that in actual fact some doctors said when you take the allopurinol it will bring on an attack of gout. Okay, the advice I then had was conflicting because some doctors then said, Right, when you have an attack of gout, stop taking the allopurinol, take the anti-inflammatory, get it back under control, go back onto the allopurinol. Now other doctors have said, No, keep taking the allopurinol, take the anti-inflammatory and keep going so there was a conflict. So you think to yourself, what do I do? What do I do? So I made the decision that I’d stop taking the allopurinol and, as I say, I did some research just before I contacted you, and I read that the allopurinol or the drug, whatever allopurinol is, actually takes about 12 months to build up and be effective, so you’ve got something like a 12 month running period before it will actually show any results. Now nobody has ever said that to me, no doctor, nobody said, Look, this is a long term solution, you got to stick with it. So of course through lack of advice, I’m trying to sort of do, not do my own medication but sort it out myself.

It was just surprising the number of people who also commented that they’d suffered from it. It was a bit of a revelation because I didn’t – I just assumed that it was a very rare condition and it obviously wasn’t. Most people who had experienced it, or knew of other people who had experienced it were really very sympathetic because they’d all said they’d had real problems. So there you go, that was a bit encouraging I suppose.

Well, thankfully weve got the internet. If we hadn’t have got the internet then I think my lack of knowledge, or my level or knowledge would be virtually the same as what it was 30 years ago, because where do you go to find out these things? But because of the internet now theres a wealth of information, although it hasn’t resolved the problem, one of the things it brought home to me was how big a problem it is, and growing, because you tend to think that theres only you in the world, whole wide world, that’s suffering with this particular problem and why you sort of thing. By looking at the net obviously you can see that it, that’s not the case, so the internet is our greatest source of information, and I still check it on a fairly regular basis to see if theres anything new, but it’s all pretty much, seems to have reached a, not a limit, but it seems to have reached a point where most of the information is the same at the present time. Whether sort of research that you’re doing is going to, you know, increase our knowledge or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve, I don’t know but the internet is the place for us, that’s where weve been.

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.

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.

Well, if you go in Google images for gout, then, don’t do that. Because, of course, I suppose, you know, people with later stage or uncontrolled gout, which must be one of – well, which is certainly, you know – if you talk about the things that worry you about the disease, I suppose that would be it. So if you go on the internet, start looking at images of tophi and, you know, the effect it can have on, long-term, on joints, then that’s not the first thing, I suppose, you want to encounter, with no understanding of the, the disease. There are, well, what I think are quite effective treatments and management of the disease. So, you know, encountering those [Laughter] images as the first port of call, not knowing, yeah, what’s going to happen next is difficult, so, yeah, I wouldn’t do that again.