I've never had gout and I hope you haven't either but I do know that gout is one of the most painful conditions known in medicine.

What’s the cause of gout?

Our blood contains a salt called uric acid.

Uric acid is there all the time in everyone’s blood but is normally fully dissolved in the way that sugar is fully dissolved in a hot cup of tea. But, if that tea cools down? What happens to the sugar? It comes out of solution as little sharp edged crystals. Well, guess what - that's exactly what happens in an attack of gout pain.

A change in the blood chemistry allows the uric acid to crystallize out of solution and form little jaggy crystals (like bits of broken glass) in the joints. For some reason the first joint of the big toe is the most commonly affected - and the pain from gout when walking is horrific. Quite literally - as many of my patients tell me – it’s like walking over bits of broken glass.

These crystals and the change in blood chemistry that makes them appear is what causes gout pain and gout inflammation.

The treatment of gout is usually built around using anti-inflammatory medicine when the gout pain or gout inflammation is bad and – sometimes – by taking gout prevention treatment in the form of a daily tablet or syrup. But what about natural gout pain treatments? Are there other ways to treat gout pain apart from strong modern medications?

This story is true! I’d never heard of cherry juice or fresh cherries as a treatment for gout pain until I heard it recently from a patient. This man had been told it by his pharmacist, who had heard it from a relative, who had … well, you get the picture don’t you!

Anyway - a quick search for the "treatment of gout" on Google turned up one (rather ancient -1950) research paper and a whole stream of anecdotal reports about the positive effect of cherries and their juice. It seems that consuming about half a pound of fresh cherries a day or half a liter of fresh cherry juice can significantly lessen the pain and swelling of gout.

My patient had purchased tins of cherries from his local supermarket and he swore that drinking the cherry juice from the tins had made a big impact on his gout inflammation and had given him rapid gout pain relief.

If you suffer from gout pain then you might want to try kind of treatment yourself. I'm not clear whether tinned cherries can have the same effect on gout pain as fresh cherries but it’s probably worth a try if you can’t easily find the fresh varieties.

I have found nothing published to suggest that taking regular cherry juice lessens the risk of you having an attack in the first place but if you suffer from gout regularly it may be worth a try. Cherry juice, cherry pie, ice cream with cherry sauce? Mmmm – that sure sounds good to me!

Dr Gordon Cameron MD is based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Joint pain, arthritis pain and frozen shoulder are among his areas of special expertise. He has published an excellent electronic book called How to Live with a Frozen Shoulder and is a regular contributor to magazines and textbooks.

You can visit Dr Cameron's website for more information about whiplash injury and the treatment of gout