I had a rough stretch recently.
I took a medication tha,t it turned out, had something really bad in it. Not sure what. I reported it to the manufacturer. It caused my stomach to burn for days.
I had not had heartburn for a long time. And there it was again, keeping me awake, striking during the day after meals, etc.
Nothing about my diet changed. Nothing about my weight changed except I am slowly losing bellyfat.
Nothing about my stomach changed.
The only thing that changed was consuming this really bad medication. I have been speaking to the manufacturer and so far they have said they are sending it out for testing. If they don’t continue talking to me and engaging I will report them to the FDA.
Anyway.
I have watched countless men get heartburn, often after stressful situations.
Divorce. A lawsuit. A kid in trouble. A business going sideways.
And then the burn.
I have written about heartburn many times over the years
I developed a protocol to get rid of it without acid-blocking drugs. It works great. I’m doing it now, myself and the problem is fading.
I also wrote about how heartburn is mostly too little stomach acid and not too much.
In a recent article, I said something almost in passing. I have thought about it a lot and researched and think you will benefit from hearing about my findings.
There is a weird part.
In 1997 a Swedish group ran 509 people who had heartburn and a clean endoscopy through a real randomized trial.
Full-dose omeprazole, half-dose omeprazole, or a sugar pill. Four weeks.
At four weeks, the people on the full dose who had complete absence of heartburn — total relief, no burn at all — came to 46 percent.
Placebo was 13 percent. So the drug is doing something real.
But look at the other result.
More than half. On the correct dose. For a month.
And nobody in that trial had a single visible mark on their esophagus according to the camera scope.
The doctor’s answer to those 54 people, then and now, is a higher dose. Then a different pill. Then a shrug. Then a note in the chart about anxiety.
Now.
There is a measurement that separates the people who burn from the people who do not.
It has nothing to do with how much acid you make.
It has nothing to do with how stressed you are, either, although stress moves it.
It takes a biopsy and a pathologist willing to run a special stain, and it is not on any insurance form in this country, so almost nobody has ever had it done.
When somebody finally did it, the number in the clean-scope group was about a third of the number in everybody else.
I am going to tell you three of my findings here.
What acute stress does to a healthy esophagus when there is no acid in the picture at all.
Why the people with the worst visible damage in their esophagus are the ones who feel the least.
And why one antidepressant trial lit up all the right parts of the brain and did absolutely nothing at all for the patients — and why that failure is more useful than a success would have been.
Quick disclaimer: I am not your doctor and this is not medical advice. I am a men’s health educator who reads a lot of research. Talk to your own doctor before you start or stop anything, especially if you are on a prescription.
In 2008 a group out of Bologna University did something that almost never gets done.
Instead of studying people who show up at a clinic complaining, they went to two Italian villages, Loiano and Monghidoro, and asked everybody some questions.
They approached 1,533 adults. They got 1,033 of them to fill out a real symptom questionnaire and then swallow a scope.
Healthy people, sick people, complainers, non-complainers. Everybody.
44 out of every 100 people had reflux symptoms.
Visible esophagitis — actual inflammation you can see through the camera — showed up in about 12 out of every 100.
So far that just sounds like most symptoms are mild. Fine.
Here is the part that is not fine….
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.