Travel Tips
Gout can make certain areas of your life difficult, and one of these areas is traveling. The difficulty experienced when traveling with gout is often upsetting to many people, as they wish to travel on family vacations or to see different parts of the world. It’s important to know that just because you have gout, it doesn’t mean you’re unable to travel. There’s a few travel tips you can use when traveling with gout, and by using these tips, you will find that traveling is simple and you can get anywhere you’d like without the hassle of dealing with gout.
The first issue
If you travel and don’t have all of the prescription medications you use to treat your gout with you, you still have options. It’s difficult to take all of your medications used for gout on every trip, but there’s one essential that can make your trip go smoothly.
You need to take a medication used to treat a gout attack. Your doctor can offer you with one of these, and make the likelihood of you experiencing an episode much less likely. Generally, an anti-inflammatory steroid should be taken on the trip to help reduce or prevent attacks. Generally, an anti-inflammatory steroid is used to treat gout attacks effectively. One important thing to remember is that aspirin should be avoided as a form of treatment for attacks and this can lead to other symptoms during travel that you may not be able to treat. To prevent an attack it’s best to take the medication once every six hours, rather than taking it once a day. A six hour spacing will reduce the likelihood of an attack greatly.
Foods to avoid
The food you eat can play a huge role in how many attacks you get. By keeping your temptations in check and avoiding these foods, you can keep your gout in check while traveling.
- Alcohol: While it can be difficult to avoid alcohol while traveling, it is one of the biggest causes of a gout attack. Alcohol, especially beer is high in a chemical called purines, which can lead to an attack quickly
- Liver and kidney: These are both high in purines.
- Seafood
- Spinach
Drinking lots of water and avoiding foods that contain high levels of purine can reduce your gout attacks greatly.
Have a backup plan
People with gout often forget that there’s help outside of their typical doctor and pharmacy. If you experience symptoms from your gout or an attack you cannot get under control, visiting the local pharmacy in the area can offer you with the help you need. There’s certain over the counter medications that can help treat an attack in this type of situation, and the pharmacist on-call can offer this information to you.