The Heartburn & Acid Reflux Blog

Acid Reflux Natural Remedies & Getting down to the Root Cause of Your Pain

If you're like I was, and you've been to the doctor multiple times for heartburn or acid reflux problems, you may be ready to throw those stupid pills to the side in favor of natural remedies.  You may wonder why your doctor went straight to suggesting pills anyway (pharmaceuticals are a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S. alone, and natural remedies can't be patented and sold at outrageous prices--you do the math). 

I'm not going to talk here about swallowing vinegar or mustard to relieve temporary acid reflux or heartburn symptoms (though we've had blog commenters swear by both, especially mustard).  My biggest suggestion to you is to find out why you're getting acid reflux.  Yeah, figure out the cause instead of just taking drugs (this concept perplexed my general practitioner).  In my case, I found out I was gluten- and dairy-intolerant and once I eliminated these foods from my diet (yes, now that I'm better I can cheat a little now and then without major repercussions), my nights of lying awake wondering if I was having a heart attack or if I'd ever be able to sleep without sitting up in a chair went away.  Years later, it's hard to remember just how awful it was, but I know I was miserable there for quite a while.

I definitely recommend everyone who has these problems (or other digestive ailments--even my acne was a result of my body's intolerance for gluten and dairy) get tested for food allergies or food intolerances (intolerance means that you can eat the food without immediately getting sick, which is why it can be hard to diagnose; but, over time, the foods are giving you longterm health problems).  I had to go to a natural doctor to get this done because the regular one just wasn't into looking for root causes.  It only cost about $125 for a blood draw and test that checked me for the 100 most common food allergies.  Compare that to the price of all those pills and the surgery they wanted to do (putting a scope down there to check things out)

While food allergies won't necessarily be the cause of everyone's heartburn/acid reflux problems, they're definitely worth ruling out before going onto other possible causes.  Environmental factors have also been known to affect our health (if you live in a damp climate or have had moisture get into your house, you may check into black mold as a cause of heartburn and other health problems).

Imbalances of yeasts in your digestive tract can also cause heartburn and other problems.  I posted briefly on Candida a few years ago, when I first learned of it, but if you Google the troublesome yeast, you'll find more information on how it can cause acid reflux and a whole host of other health problems.  People with high sugar/high refined foods diets and who have taken courses of antibiotics seem to be particularly at risk for yeast imbalances.

Other things to consider are sleep (are you getting enough? it's hard to sleep when you have acid reflux at night, so it can be something of a vicious circle), stress, and leaky gut syndrome (another one to Google--it's sometimes caused by food intolerances or yeast imbalances).  As you can see, a lot of these problems are interconnected and related.  The true "natural remedy" for acid reflux or heartburn is to find out what's at the root of your problems.

Recommended reading (the book that taught me enough to know to ask for a food allergy test):

No More Heartburn: Stop the Pain in 30 Days--Naturally! : The Safe, Effective Way to Prevent and Heal Chronic Gastrointestinal Disorders

Another life-changing read (the one that led me to the clinic where I was eventually tested):

Why Stomach Acid is Good for You: Natural Relief from Heartburn, Indigestion, Reflux and GERD

Foods That Help You Sleep

Heartburn is a pain in the butt, especially at night when it can keep you from sleeping.  It always seemed like the longer it took me to fall asleep, the more likely my symptoms would come on, making it even harder to find rest.  On the flip side, sometimes when I was exhausted enough, I'd fall asleep regardless of heartburn or before it could start to bother me.  In case other people have the same problem (or are just struggling with insomnia in general), I figured I'd post a list of foods that may help you sleep:

• turkey, beef, veal
• tuna fish
• dates
• milk
• whole-grain breads/cereals
• yogurt
• cottage cheese
• peanut butter
• rice

There is some science behind this seemingly random list.  These are all foods that are high in L-Tryptophan, an essential amino acid that, once eaten and digested, is converted into serotonin, a neurotransmitter that controls moods, pain levels, and our ability to fall asleep.  According to the Natural Stomach Care book, "adults who suffer from insomnia are often found to have low levels of serotonin in their blood.  Elderly people are notoriously deficient in this substance and tend to suffer from insomnia more frequently than younger people."  The list above contains foods that are all high in L-Tryptophan, so if you're having trouble sleeping, snack on some turkey and milk a couple hours before bedtime.

First Steps (AKA My Trip to the Tahoma Clinic)

Ok, after a few years of off and on trouble with acid reflux, I went to the Tahoma Clinic in Renton, WA today (the clinic consists of M.D.s who are basically into finding out the roots of the problem and prescribing supplements, when possible, instead of the latest drug craze).  It was my first visit, so I chatted with my doctor for a while.  She took one look at my fingernails (they have vertical ridges in them, something I'd never thought twice or even once about) and knew that my body wasn't absorbing things (protein, vitamins, & minerals) correctly.  Since I have a good diet, it's not from lacking of eating the right things.  Her first guess was food allergies (I had ear infections as a child, which can apparently be an indicator of food allergies).  Food allergies can cause all sorts of GI trouble, including acid reflux/heartburn.  (I really had no idea about this stuff until I started reading books on it.)  Since I have environmental allergies, it doesn't surprise me, but I have never gotten hives or anything like that from eating food (unlike a friend of mine who can end up in the hospital if she has something with eggs in it), so I never suspected.

Anyway, my first step was to go next door and have my blood drawn for a food allergies test.  I'll get the results back on that within a couple weeks.  In the meantime, my doctor prescribed a bunch of supplements (mostly vitamins) that will help make up for my imbalances, and some supposed to be good at strengthening the LES (which is the little dealy at the bottom of the esophagus that lets food into your stomach and--when you're having troubles--acid out).

For the curious, here's a list of what she's giving me:

• manganese -- 50 mg daily
• choline -- 1,000 mg 3 x daily
• pantothenic acid (B5) -- 500 mg 3x daily
• B1 -- 50 mg 3 x daily
• glutamine -- 1 tsp. 3 x daily (between meals), which is dissolved in a little bit of water (this helps heal the stomach lining)
• B12 -- 1 cc injected 3 x weekly (this is supposed to help my asthma--see post on my asthma and how it could be related to heartburn--as well as lowering the stomach acid so it'll break down food better).  Later, I should be able to go to a B12 pill instead of the injections.

So, anyway, it's a lot of stuff, but if I find out a food allergy is responsible for my troubles, then in the future I'll just have to avoid that food, and I shouldn't have to take anything.  These supplements are designed to help get my body back into a healthy state (and maybe make those ridgey fingernails go away, heh).

Of course, if it doesn't turn out that my acid reflux is from a food allergy, the other possibility is that my stomach doesn't produce enough acid.  I'll have to have a "Heidelberg" test done to check that.  The test involves swallowing a capsule on a little string, while they monitor your stomach for an hour or two (all the while this string is going from your stomach to dangling outsside your mouth).  If that turns out to be my problem (not enough stomach acid), I would have to take an HCL and pepsin supplement, pretty much forever.  Personally, I'm hoping for the food allergy, even if it means giving up something I enjoy.  But either way would be better than not being able to sleep at night because of acid reflux, something that would surely only get worse as I get older.

I'll keep updating with progress.

Seeking Treatment

In my last post, I mentioned I was reading Why Stomach Acid is Good for You, a book by an M.D. and a Ph.D. It's the third book related to heartburn and digestive problems I've read, and it's a pretty good one.  I noticed when looking at the back that the doctor's clinic is actually here in the Puget Sound area.  It's on the other side of town, and quite a drive, but I decided to make an appointment.  Unfortunately, these "natural medicine" kind of clinics aren't covered by health insurance, but after the best advice my regular doctor could give me was take Prilosec for the rest of your life, I'm willing to try something new.

My appointment is on Thursday (I just called today, Monday, so it's nice that they're quick), and I'll be seeing someone who specializes in digestive problems.  I'm just hoping someone can tell me what my problem is and how to make it better.  Last night I only got about three hours of sleep because the discomfort kept me up.  Even though I've read a few books now, it's hard to know where to start (do you have an overgrowth of Candida in your stomach? Is it food allergies?  Is it leaky gut?  Like I would know?), and I'm not really a fan of self-medicating, heh.

Anyway, I'll post after my appointment and share what I've learned.  Here's the web site if you're in the Seattle area and are interested: http://www.tahoma-clinic.com/ (There are some articles on the site, too, for non-Seattle types who are just looking for information.)

Asthma and Heartburn--Is There a Link?

It never occurred to me that there might be a link between asthma and heartburn until Dr. Wright mentioned it in Why Stomach Acid is Good for You.

"What is the connection between reflux and asthma? No one knows for sure, but it is certainly complex. It is unclear, for example, whether acid reflux causes asthma, whether asthma causes reflux, or whether both result from a common cause, such as low gastric acidity or activity in the vagus nerve, which serves both the gut and the airways."

Since I do have mild asthma (mostly allergy induced) and take a steroid inhaler to keep it in check, this certainly caught my attention.  I'm a bit of an odd case in that I never had asthma as a kid.  It wasn't until I was about 18 and had a nasty case of pneumonia that I started having chronic problems. It was about five years later that I first noticed trouble with acid reflux (though I had no idea what it was back then), and it's taken another five years for me to get serious about addressing the problem (it's been much worse lately--before it only flared up intermittently).  But anyway, the book really caught my eye when it said there may be a link between the medications for asthma and heartburn:

It is known that drugs that are commonly used to treat asthma, such as the bronchodilators theophylline, albuterol, ephedrine, and pseudoephedrine, can weaken the LES valve, and thus promote acid reflux.

I'm not sure if Flovent (the inhaler, I use) has any of those ingredients, but the book touched on steroid medicines as a possible trigger for heartburn too.

A couple of articles I found on the Internet addressed the link between asthma and heartburn too (check out Heartburn and Asthma and Heartburn's Hidden Effects).  Most of the articles I found suggested heartburn could cause asthma (or at least asthma flare ups).  Now I'm wondering if it might be the other way around.  Can asthma lead to heartburn?  This is particularly of interest to me, since my asthma is mostly (if not entirely) allergy-based.  When I've lived in other parts of the country, I had almost no trouble with asthma.  It was only when I came back to Seattle that I had to get on Flovent again.  Wouldn't it be something if mold or something crazy was the reason I had trouble with acid reflux?

These books are really opening my eyes on how the whole body works together and how our drug-quaffing society seems to overlook finding root problems.  My doctor, anyway, was just interested in masking the problem with Prilosec.  One thing I'm realizing is that reading is only going to get me so far.  I'm going to have to see a doctor (preferably one who's more into natural health stuff) to get tested for this.  (I've been dreading having something dangled down into my stomach, but I'm at the point where I need to know what's causing my problems.) 

First Post

I'm 28, female, and have had issues with heartburn (AKA GERD, acid reflux disease) for a few years already.  It's frustrating, if only because you expect these problems to start when you get older.  After yet another night where I have trouble sleeping (I get pain/pressure in my chest, that makes it hard to relax and fall asleep), I've decided to start a blog about this and take it more seriously.  If I had trouble every single night, I probably would have made that decision a while ago, but it comes and goes, troubling me for a week or two, then being less of an issue for a while.  I've spent lots of time on the Internet surfing for natural remedies (I've been to the doctor but I'll discuss how rather unhelpful that was in another post) and haven't really found anything that worked.  I finally broke down and ordered a handful of books with good reviews from Amazon that are supposed to have advice on how to fight heartburn and other digestion ailments naturally.  (I've tried Prilosec but it hasn't been stellar, and I'm very concerned about the long term effects of using drugs like this.)

So, basically this blog is going to explain the steps I take in trying to fight acid reflux, including what works for me and what doesn't.  I'll also be posting snippets of news articles and information from the books I read.  My hope is that when other people who have this problem are out surfing the web in the middle of the night, they'll at least find a useful source to read and maybe be comforted by finding someone else with common problems.