First, gout is a serious condition and your friend should
be under the care of a doctor.  But having said that,
I must admit I've had many gout attacks and I've never
seen a doctor for it.

Drink lots of water, stay off the affected joint, and
avoid the foods that cause gout.  (Unless you have
some sort of kidney problem, in which case drinking
water may be the worst thing you can do.  Drinking
water is helpful only if you are having no problem
generating and passing urine.)

Gout is caused by accumulation of insoluble uric acid
crystals in the joints, which in turn is caused by
overloading your kidneys with organic nitrogen.
Normally, the kidneys send nitrogenous waste out
of the body as urea in the urine.  But when they
get overloaded due to impaired kidney function or
eating too much nitrogen-containing food, the body
has to put that nitrogen somewhere, and it ends up
as uric acid crystals usually in the toes or feet.
(Uric acid is more familiar as the white part of
bird droppings.)

Like frostbite, working the affected tissue causes
the crystals to grind against the tissues, damaging
them.  At the FIRST sign of gout, stay off the
affected joints.  Otherwise, you will later feel
much more pain.

The foods which contribute to gout are rich in
protein or nucleic acids (or both).  At the FIRST
sign of gout, immediately stop eating these foods.
Protein-rich foods are meat, eggs, and cheese.
Egg yolks and ripened cheeses (any aged cheese).
pack a particularly strong gout-producing punch.

Continue to avoid these foods until the gout is
COMPLETELY gone.  Some of my worst flare-ups have
occurred by going back to eating meat too soon
after an attack.

By avoiding the gout-producing foods and drinking
lots of water, I've been free of gout for the last
5 years -- longer than any earlier period of my adult
life.  However, gout can be a sign of a much more
serious problem, kidney disease.  That's why you
should be checked out by a doctor if you have gout.
In my case, I know that every attack was precipitated
by eating too much meat or cheese.  Often, I remember
asking myself whether eating this would cause gout,
as I ate the food I suspected might precipitate
another attack.

There is a drug used for gout -- colchicine.  The
corm (tuber-like enlarged underground stem) of the
crocus is rich in colchicine, but dosage control
is important.  You'd be nuts to try to self-medicate
for gout with saffron corms.  I would be reluctant
to use pharmaceutical colchicine, because it is
believed to work by inhibiting a fundamentally important
cellular function (microtubule assembly), which seems
like an awfully critical system to mess with if you
can avoid it.  (Make no mistake -- the pain can be
intense -- I wouldn't fault anyone for grasping at
any possibility for its relief.)

Aspirin helps a lot.

Here's a good page about colchicine:

http://www.phc.vcu.edu/Feature/oldfeature/colchicine/colchicine.html

And here's a letter about the critical importance of dose:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7434/288-c