Treating Acid Reflux
Treating Acid Reflux should ideally start with healthful lifestyle choices. Making a few adjustments can appreciably reduce occurrence of the symptoms of acid reflux. Have small meals more frequently instead of pigging out in just one sitting. Eating large meals will expand your stomach and add upward pressure against the lower esophageal sphincter (LES). Another important adjustment you should do is restricting your intake of acid-inducing food and drink.
If you are serious about treating acid reflux, you must give up drinking and smoking if you have either of these two bad habits. Smoking slows down saliva production, which is one of the body’s means of protection against esophageal damage. It may also stimulate stomach acid production, weaken the digestive valves, harm the esophagus, and delay the process of digestion.
Meanwhile, beverages with alcohol content can also add to stomach acid production as well as make the esophagus more sensitive to the stomach acid and cause irregular swallowing contractions. Alcohol can also bring about peptic ulcers and hold back the healing of ulcers that have already taken hold.
Certain drugs can be taken if treating acid reflux, though you should ask your doctor before taking them. Antacids are the primary option because they are over-the-counter medications that are effective in neutralizing stomach acid. The majority of antacids contain alginic acid and sodium bicarbonate. The combination of these two substances will create a foam barrier that floats atop the surface of the stomach acid to reduce the number of reflux episodes.
Histamine-2 receptor blockers are a class of drugs for treating acid reflux. Examples of such drugs are famotidine and nizatidine, which can decrease the amount of acid in the stomach. Additionally, these drugs are used in the treatment of peptic ulcers (and prevention of the ulcers’ reappearance), acid indigestion, occasional heartburn, and sour stomach. Proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are one more class of prescription medications for impeding release of acids in the stomach and intestines.
In case the methods that have been mentioned do not work, one can possibly undergo a radio-frequency procedure for treating acid reflux. This procedure is an endoscopic treatment of minimal invasiveness, done on an outpatient basis. The doctor will use an endoscope to send radio-frequency energy that creates thermal lesions in the highest part of the stomach and the LES. The effect of this is tissue constraint and a thickening of the muscle wall in these areas. The patient will enjoy the benefit of a reduction in acid reflux occurrence since the LES no longer relaxes when it is not supposed to.
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