Cancer?
If you burp up a lot of acid into your throat across a period of years, apparently it can cause your throat and esophagus to take a lot of damage and even cause cancer there. In fact, the difference between Nexium and Prilosec is that Nexium has an ingredient to help heal the throat.
It’s not a common thing, but a lot of people live with acid reflux for years and don’t consider that all that burping of acid may be tearing up their esophagus. Best to address the problem and get some control over all that acid slopping around your gastric system.
Do the meds build up a tolerance though?
Not to my knowledge. As far as I know, once you get the proper dose figured out, you shouldn’t have to vary it much. I’ve been taking pretty much the same dose of stomach medication from age 27 to age 55. If anything, the dosage has gone down considerably now that I’m retired and have reduced overall stress.
Some people have hyperacidity and can require tremendous amounts of medicine to get it under control. But that’s pretty rare.
@Huxley:
Pickles usually solve stomach upsets because of the high salt content of pickles; salt neutralizes acid. But it’s not a good long-term solution: Too much salt can give you problems with high blood pressure.
As for your other suggestions, it depends on the individual. For most people, fatty foods increase acid production, and bready foods provide some relief (by soaking up the excess acid in the stomach). But you don’t want to be eating bready foods all the time--you’ll gain weight quickly.
Other foods are a case-by-case thing. For me, roughage (raw veggies, salads, etc.) aggravates my stomach because it’s difficult to digest. Meantime, I'm perfectly fine with pizza, mexican, and spicy foods, because they tend to be bready and help soak up the extra acid for me. Really, everyone just needs to see what foods make them personally feel better and what foods make them feel worse.
Also, a lot depends on the cause.
1) A case of gastritis can be temporary. A week or two of prilosec and zantac may provide enough relief to let the stomach heal itself.
2) A long-term case of gastritis can be caused by a bacteria: Heliobacter pylori (look it up in wiki). A gastroenterologist can do the test and prescribe a treatment of antibiotics and PPIs.
3) A long-term case of gastritis can be caused by genetics and natural high level of acid production and stress. Ultimately, the only long-term solution may be to get on a permanent treatment of meds, as I described in my previous post.
4) And so on. There are other possible causes. A gastroenterologist would have to investigate to spot them, though.
Ultimately, if the problem lasts more than a couple weeks then you should probably see a gastroenterologist and at least let him/her rule out a bacteriological cause.
