The History of Acid Reflux
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This is not a new
illness, and people have suffered with the symptoms of
acid reflux since as far as we can tell. There is a lot
of evidence of old treatments for this condition that
were used to treat it in different cultures. It was much
harder back then, as the medical practitioners were not
equipped with the tools that allowed them to witness how
the food was being digested and see inside of the
throats. The length of an average throat is approximately
nine inches which is impossible to examine without the
use of a tiny camera. Even with all of the information
available now, many people have a hard time pinning down
that their symptoms are caused due to
GERD.
Digestion
has been fairly mystic until recently, and even today you will
often read contradictory news related to the same food item.
One day coffee is either hurtful, and the next it is beneficial
depending on who is sponsoring the magazine at that moment. The
food pyramid itself has been designed by the special interest
selling the product and isn’t necessarily even close to what we
should be eating. This makes it even more difficult to find
helpful information and know what we should and shouldn’t
eat.
In olden
times it was said that due to cooking of the foods on high fire
the belly has a reaction causing for it to burn. This theory
was either disputed or promoted by doctors who mostly
experimented on their own bodies and came to different
conclusions. It might be that the raw diet evolved from these
studies but I will get more in depth on that elsewhere. Others
thought that the process of breaking down the food was strictly
mechanical and like any engine the stomach simply tends to
overheat.
The biggest
breakthrough came thanks to a young man named Alexis St. Mornay
who was due to bad luck shot in the stomach. He survived thanks
to being lucky that it happened very close to an American
military installation which employed Dr. William Beaumont.
Alexis lived through the shooting but his stomach never
completely healed and left a gaping hole inside with a tunnel
like opening.
During the
next several years, Dr. Beaumant learned an incredible amount
about digestion by experimenting on poor Alexis. He would place
food into the hole secured by a string and pull it out to see
what happened to it. This let us know that beef for example
takes around four hours to digest. He looked inside the hole at
different times during the digestive process and performed many
other experiments. Thanks to these we were able to learn a ton
about digestive juices and how the digestive process
works.
The next
step came a couple decades later with the creation of electric
lights. This is when the field of endoscopy as a science was
created. This allowed for medical practitioners to shine a
light in the areas of the body which was previously closed off
to them. Using a series of mirrors they were able to examine
the throat and the rectum in more detail by reflecting images.
This was very painful to the one examined and newer technology
which has evolved lately makes the process much more pleasant.
New fiber optic lighting can easily see inside the curves of
the GI tract and other emerging technology such as biopsy
snares allow to extract tissue samples.
Seeing the
digestive process in action was only the beginning. Many
theories have formed identifying why exactly heartburn happens
and how it comes about. In the last century things started
coming together as many different doctors published papers only
a few years apart moving the understanding of the condition
forward. They realized that it was caused by the acid, and that
it was coming up and hurting the throat lining. It was often
referred to as “reflux esophagitis.” Some others tried to call
it “hiatal hernia,” and blame the uppers stomach for pushing
the food out since that was absent in many patients it did not
stick around.
These days,
with the technological improvements an entire field of stomach
specialists are working hard on understanding the causes and
coming up with better solutions to the problem. Hundreds of
people, such as me, have been able to keep the symptoms at bay
and live a normal life. Things are bound to only get better
from here as the treatments and diagnosis continue to
evolve.
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