Home remedies · Back, muscles & joints
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
About ten to fifteen sour cherries a day, or one to two tablespoons of sour cherry concentrate in water, over weeks. In the studies it ran from two days to four months — it is not something taken during an attack but something continued between them.
The substances are anthocyanins, the red pigments of the cherry. In the laboratory they inhibit enzymes involved in inflammation, and cherry lowers blood uric acid slightly by increasing how much leaves through the kidney. In an observation of over six hundred people with gout, fewer attacks occurred in the days after eating cherries — markedly fewer when a uric-acid-lowering drug was taken as well. Observation means: counted, not compared.
It is not a treatment for an attack and does not replace a uric-acid-lowering drug — in the observation the combination did best, not the cherry alone. That kind of observation allows no cause-and-effect claim; good comparative trials are missing. Cherry concentrate brings a lot of sugar, which is unfavourable in gout — keep an eye on the amount. And the biggest lever stays elsewhere: fructose, beer and alcohol in general drive uric acid up more than cherries bring it down.
A single joint that turns hot, deep red and barely touchable within hours, with fever — that can be a gout attack or an infected joint, and the two look alike. It belongs seen the same day.
Have it assessed rather than treated at home: back pain with numbness in the saddle area, disturbed bladder or bowel function, weakness or fever. A joint that cannot bear weight after an injury, or is deformed. A one-sided swollen, warm leg.