My Doctor Said Women My Age Don’t Get Gout. Then I Started a Water Pill.
At 3:12 in the morning on a Tuesday in March, I woke up because the bedsheet was touching my big toe.
Not a cramp. Not a stubbed toe. It felt like somebody had packed the joint with broken glass and then lit it.
I’m 66. I kept the books at a Chevy dealership in Columbus for twenty-two years. I am not a dramatic woman. I lay there in the dark and cried.
By four o’clock I had taken the kitchen scissors to my favorite pink slipper. I cut the whole front off, because I could not stand anything touching that toe.
“Probably a sprain.”
My husband Rick drove me to the emergency room at six. I went in wearing one shoe and one slipper with no front.
The doctor looked at my foot for maybe a minute. Had I bumped it? I hadn’t. Twisted it? No. “Probably a sprain,” he said. Ice, ibuprofen, keep it up.
I asked if it could be gout. My father had gout. He shook his head kindly. In a woman, he said, it would be unusual.
Two weeks later my own doctor said almost the same thing, word for word.
Six weeks after that, it came back. Same toe. Same hour of the night. Same broken glass.
“Urgent care said it was my shoes. My doctor said arthritis. It took a third flare and a blood test before anybody said the word gout. I had been on a water pill for a year by then.”
Linda R. · 68 · Dayton, OH
★★★★★
The answer didn’t come from a doctor at all. It came from the man who fills my prescriptions.
Two questions nobody had asked me.
Phil has been the pharmacist at our Kroger for thirty-one years. He knows my name, my husband’s name, and every pill in our cabinet.
I was limping when I picked up my refills. He asked what happened. I told him all of it. The glass, the slipper, the sprain that wasn’t.
He didn’t even look at his screen. “When did they start you on the hydrochlorothiazide?”
I had to think about it. November. About four months before that night.
He nodded like he’d heard this story a hundred times. Then he asked the second question, the one I thought was strange.
“And what do you drink in a day?”
I laughed. I don’t drink. A glass of wine at Christmas, that’s it.
He meant everything. So I told him. Orange juice with breakfast, because my doctor wants me getting vitamin C. Sweet tea with lunch. A ginger ale in the afternoon when my stomach is off.
And since my first flare, a big glass of tart cherry juice at bedtime. My sister-in-law swears by it for gout.
Phil looked at me the way you look at somebody who has been doing everything right and getting it all wrong.
Most of it is fructose. Sweet tea and lemonade land in the same range.
The juice doesn’t just raise your blood sugar. It makes uric acid.
The sugar in fruit juice, soda, sweet tea and lemonade is largely fructose. Your liver handles almost all of it.
Here’s what nobody tells you. When the liver breaks fructose down, it burns through its own energy so fast that the leftovers turn into uric acid.
So every sweet glass is a little uric acid factory. Within an hour, the level in your blood can go up.
This isn’t a theory. Harvard researchers followed almost 79,000 women for 22 years. It was published in JAMA in 2010.
Women who drank one sugary soda a day had a 74 percent higher risk of gout. One glass of orange juice a day meant 41 percent higher. Two or more glasses, more than double.
The gout sheet the ER gave me said no steak, no shrimp, no beer. I don’t eat steak. I don’t drink beer. Not one word about the orange juice.
And here is the cruel part. Every one of those glasses was sold to me as the healthy choice. Vitamin C. Real fruit. The cherry juice was supposed to be the cure.
“I drank tart cherry juice every night for four months and my flares got worse, not better. Orange juice every morning too. Nobody told me it was all sugar. Cutting the juice was the first thing that made a difference.”
Patty S. · 64 · Erie, PA
★★★★★
See what Phil told me to take instead →
Lots of people drink juice and never get gout. So why me, and why now? That’s where the little pill came in.
More in. Less out.
Phil drew it for me on the back of my pharmacy bag.
Picture a sink. The sugar in your drinks is the faucet, pouring uric acid in all day long. Your kidneys are the drain. Uric acid leaves through a small exit door in each kidney.
Now the water pill. It leaves your body through that very same door. The pill and the uric acid end up fighting for the same way out.
The pill crowds the doorway. A little uric acid gets turned back every day and sent into your blood again. Phil calls it the Exit Door Squeeze.
Faucet wide open. Drain half shut. The pill does its job, your pressure comes down, and underneath, uric acid quietly climbs. No pain. No warning.
In one study that followed women for decades, those on a diuretic were more than twice as likely to develop gout.
“My wife and I went on the same blood pressure pill the same winter. Same sweet tea at every meal, too. We both had gout before the year was out. Our pharmacist connected it in about ten seconds.”
Dale H. · 69 · Lexington, KY
★★★★★
Why “women your age” is exactly backwards.
Before menopause, estrogen helps the kidneys push uric acid out. It holds the door open. That is one big reason gout is rare in younger women.
After menopause, the estrogen leaves, and that help leaves with it. By her sixties, a woman’s uric acid has climbed to about where a man’s is.
So picture it. Menopause took away the hand holding the door. The water pill leans on it. And four glasses of juice a day keep the faucet running.
“Two years of ‘arthritis in your foot.’ I went through the change twenty years ago, I’ve been on a water pill since 2019, and I drank lemonade like water. When the pharmacist put it all together, I had to sit down right there in the store.”
Gloria M. · 71 · Macon, GA
★★★★★
Why the big toe. Why 3 a.m.
Uric acid stays dissolved in your blood as long as there isn’t too much of it, and as long as you stay warm.
Your big toe is the coldest joint in your body. It is the farthest one from your heart. At night your body temperature drops a little more.
On a water pill, you’re often a little low on fluid by bedtime. And I was finishing every day with a big glass of sugar.
That’s when uric acid comes out of the blood and forms crystals in the joint. Tiny, sharp, needle-shaped crystals.
Your immune system finds those needles and attacks them. That attack is the fire. That was my broken glass at 3:12.
Help your body clear what it holds back →
What to stop, and what never to stop.
Stop the juice. All of it. Water, coffee, unsweetened tea. Phil said that one change turns the faucet down more than any diet sheet.
Easy on the daily ibuprofen. Taken every day, it can push blood pressure up, and it’s hard on the same kidneys trying to clear the uric acid.
Never stop the water pill on your own. I told Phil I was thinking about it. He put his pen down.
“Don’t you dare,” he said. “Your blood pressure is what causes strokes. Keep your pill. We’re going to help your body clear what it holds back.”
Then he told me the part that surprised me most. My sister-in-law was right about the cherries. She was just wrong about the glass.
The cherry was right. The juice was wrong.
Along the shore of Lake Michigan, around Traverse City, grows a small, sour, bright red cherry called the Montmorency. Most of America’s tart cherries come from there.
They’re too sour to eat off the tree. What makes them special is their color, a deep red pigment called anthocyanins.
Anthocyanins work on both ends of my problem. They are linked to helping the body clear uric acid. And they help calm the fire the crystals set off.
In 2012, researchers at Boston University followed 633 people with gout. On the days they had cherries or cherry extract, their risk of an attack was 35 percent lower.
An older USDA study found that a bowl of cherries lowered uric acid in women’s blood within five hours.
So why didn’t my bedtime glass work? Because a glass of tart cherry juice also carries about six teaspoons of sugar. I was calming the fire with one hand and feeding it with the other.
And why had nobody told me? There is no prescription for a cherry. Nobody visits doctors’ offices to talk about one. Phil only knew because he had watched it work on customers for years.
See the cherry without the juice →
What’s on my nightstand now.
It’s a tart cherry extract. 3,600 mg in one capsule a day. Zero sugar, no juice, nothing to keep in the fridge.
It is cold-extracted. Phil made a point of that. Most cherry capsules are dried with high heat, which can wreck the very anthocyanins you are paying for.
I traded four glasses of juice for water and one capsule with dinner, right next to my water pill. I didn’t stop my medicine. I stopped the sugar and added the cherry.
Here is what it won’t do. It won’t replace the medicine my doctor gave me, and I still see him every three months. What it does is help my body clear what the water pill holds back.
See today’s price on the one I take →
What changed, and when.
Week one, nothing I could feel. I want to be honest about that.
Week three, the dull ache I’d carried in that toe between flares was gone. I hadn’t even noticed how constant it was until it stopped.
Week six, I wore real shoes to my granddaughter’s choir concert and stood for the whole thing.
Month four, it hit me. Before, the fire came back every six weeks like clockwork. Since I started, not one 3 a.m.
I’m seven months in now. I threw the cut slipper away and bought a new pair. The orange juice is gone too. I don’t miss it.
I told the women in my Tuesday card group. Three of them are on a water pill. All three drink sweet tea. Two had a “sprain” in the last two years.
Start with three bottles, not one.
One bottle is 60 capsules, so about two months at one a day. The people who do best take it every single day for months, not only when a toe starts to throb.
The pricing surprised me. The 3-Bottle Bundle is about six months, and the more bottles you take, the less each one costs. It’s the one most women choose.
One bottle on its own also doesn’t ship free. Free shipping is for the bundles.
One more thing. The bundle price is the fall price, and it ends October 31. When I reordered last week, the page said this batch was 87 percent reserved, with the next batch shipping October 23.
Lock the fall price on three bottles →
The cherry I take
popular Best value55-Bottle BundleLowest price per bottle · about 10 monthsFree shipping + free HandbookSee fall
price 11 bottleAbout 2 months · shipping not included+ free Joint Relief HandbookSee fall
price
- 90-day money-back guarantee. Give it the full 90 days. If you don’t notice a real difference, you get a full refund. No forms, no runaround.
- One-time purchase. No auto-ship, ever. Nothing renews and no card is kept on file.
- Free shipping on bundles. The 3-Bottle and 5-Bottle Bundles both ship free.
- Keep your pill. It goes next to your blood pressure medicine, not instead of it.
- Zero sugar. Third-party lab tested, vegan and non-GMO.
Before you order
Is this a subscription?
Should I stop my water pill?
Can I take it with my blood pressure pill?
Isn’t cherry juice the same thing?
Do I really have to give up the juice?
When will I notice a difference?
Does it work for men too?
What if it doesn’t work for me?
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