The History of Acid Reflux
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.
|