Misery Loves Company, but Feels Terrible About It

 One of my life’s richer ironies was that of all the diseases I could’ve picked up, the one I had was once known as “rich man’s disease”: gout.  Throughout history, kings and the like were the only people wealthy enough to buy enough meat and beer to bring on the gout.  Meanwhile, I was the poorest person I knew.  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought a piece of meat from the store, and the beer I bought was so cheap I was pretty sure it was just paint mixed with soda water; yet somehow, what little money I did have was just the perfect amount it took to treat myself to shredding pain and searing humiliation.

 

I didn’t want to mention the gout because when you’re my size, people feel they have free reign to show their disgust since you’d obviously gotten it from being a drunken, fat pig.  A skinny guy with the gout was just bad luck, a genetic quirk, and he deserved our deepest sympathies.  A fat guy with it deserved lectures about how destructive living with no self-control was, and his pathetic weakness deserved not empathy, but scorn and judgment. - excerpt from the single greatest book of all time

 

I've always said that the gout is so miserable I wouldn't wish it on Hitler, but now the awful disease appears to be spreading among the masses, even as they're eating healthier:

The rich keep getting richer, but there’s been no corresponding spike in sales of historically gouty luxury foods like veal and foie gras. Red meat consumption in the United States has significantly decreased since the 19th century, and Americans have become more self-conscious about how and what they eat. Some scientists point to the dramatic rise in rates of obesity — from 13.4 percent of adults in 1980 to 42.4 percent in 2017-18 — since excess weight depresses kidney efficiency, and to the likely not unrelated introduction, in 1967, of high-fructose corn syrup, which can cause the body to produce higher levels of uric acid, and its wholesale embrace in the early 1980s by the American food industry and then the world. Once gout was confined largely to Western civilization (with some outliers, like the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan); now its ravages are global.

But of course, it may have been among the masses all along:

For all its historical freight, gout cannot be explained as an indictment of a lifestyle or an era. It’s likely that in those centuries when the disease was hailed as the wages of fortune (and thus a perverse sort of honor), the anguish of the gout-ridden poor was simply ignored or credited to less distinguished causes. Misdiagnosis can still be a problem today: The Brooklyn-based composer Mark Phillips, now 39, experienced his first attack at 30 and suffered without treatment for half a decade because the doctors he saw couldn’t believe that gout would present in someone so young and lean. Friends likewise scoffed, while his agonies mounted; at one point he thought, “I don’t want to live for another 50 years with this pain.” What now holds his symptoms at bay is a daily dose of allopurinol.

I personally thank God every freaking day for the miracle that is allopurinol.