Gout Journal
Draft — personal section still to be written
Work on Gout Journal began in 2021, after Nirbhay Agarwal discovered that he had gout. Faced with a lot of home remedies and false advice, he began exploring the medical literature to better educate himself and his family. As a software developer, he then started building an app to help people manage their gout.
Who writes this
To be written by Nirbhay — this is the part nobody else can write.
Worth covering, roughly in this order:
- When gout turned up, and what the first attack was actually like.
- What you were told to do about it, and what you found out later.
- Why the diet advice was the part that stuck, and why that turned out to be the least useful part.
- Why you built the app — what you were trying to keep track of and could not.
- Plainly stated: you are not a clinician, and you are not pretending to be.
Keep it short and specific. The credential this page needs is experience, and the detail is what makes it credible — a general statement that you "care about health" is worth nothing here.
How these articles are written
Everything on this site is anchored to the treatment guidelines and to the studies behind them, not to received wisdom about gout. In practice that means a few rules that are applied to every article without exception.
Every figure is checked against the paper it came from
No statistic is quoted from memory, from a summary, or from another article. A number appears here only after someone has opened the source and read it, and the figure is recorded with its sample size, its confidence interval and its limitations before it is ever used in prose.
Primary sources, cited in full
Articles cite the guideline or the peer-reviewed study itself, not a health blog summarising it. Every article ends with its full source list, linked, so any claim can be checked. The site is built so that an article without at least one cited source cannot be published.
Evidence that contradicts us is published too
This site takes a position — that diet restriction is pushed much harder than its evidence supports — and positions attract counter-evidence. When a study complicates the argument, it is written about here rather than left out. If an article makes a claim, the strongest objection to that claim should be in the same article.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the article carries the date it was updated. Point out an error and it will be taken seriously — including, and especially, by a clinician.
What this site is not
It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for your own doctor. Nothing here should be read as a reason to start, stop or change a medication — those decisions belong with the person who can see your test results and knows the rest of your history.
No article here has yet been reviewed by a clinician. When one has been, it will say so at the top, with their name and the date. Until then, the sources are listed at the foot of every article precisely so you do not have to take any of this on trust.
The app
Gout Journal for iPhone tracks uric acid results, flares, medication doses and water. It exists because the things that turn out to matter — whether you are at your target number, and whether you actually took the tablet — are the things nothing else was keeping track of.