Why Not Talk About Urate?
Fastidious readers of my summaries of gout research studies might have noticed that whenever urate is mentioned, I almost always change it to uric acid.
This is *not* because I think that they are the same thing. It is because, for the layman, for the average gout sufferer, i.e. for 99% of visitors to GoutPal, they can be treated as the same.
I believe that gout sufferers have enough to worry about without having to learn lots of new terms. It is good to understand the inner workings of gout. Knowledge is power, and if you understand how gout works, you are better placed to control it. However, as a medical problem, we are up against the intricacies of biochemistry and human biology. Some of these processes are very complicated, with every other word an unfamiliar medical or biological term.
Before I continue, I should explain that I have written this article in response to an off-topic comment on another thread. I...