Gout Journal
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, and started building the app he could not find. A small team works on it now, and the editorial standard below is what we hold every article to.
Who we are
Gout Journal is made by a small team. Nirbhay Agarwal founded it and writes the articles, so every one of them carries his name rather than a house byline. On a health site you should be able to see who wrote the thing you are reading.
None of us is a clinician, and none of us pretends to be. What we bring is the condition itself, the published literature, and a standard for using it.
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. Positions attract counter-evidence, and 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.