Your doctor has spend countless hours and a small fortune learning the best practices of medicine and the science of biology to provide you with the very best that modern science can to make sure you and your family stay in the very best health possible. But above and beyond knowledge, skill and expertise your doctor also knows that having a warm bedside manner sometimes means just as much to your well being as all the pills in a pharmacy.
by Glen L. Bledsoe I sat in the doctor’s office with my foot painfully swollen well beyond its normal size.
“I’m not even going to touch it,” he said. “That is the classic photo from a 1920’s medical textbook on gout.”
I said, “Nobody has gout in the 21st century. Isn’t that something Kings who ate mutton and drank mead had back in the days of yore?”
“What happened is that you ate a combination of foods that contained a lot of uric acid. Then just like in those high school experiments that demonstrated chemical precipitation your body precipitated monosodium urate crystals in the lowest region of your body. Your foot.”
The next time you wish to demonstrate chemical precipitation, I highly recommend you use lab glassware rather than your foot.
