First of all lets take a quick look at how the stomach works (or not as the case may be!) So, basically your stomach is like a bag with two valves (or sphincters), one at each end. When you swallow food comes in the top and sits on the bag (your stomach) until your body decides that it’s broken down enough to move on into the small intestine.
How your body judges this is by how acidic your stomach is. If your stomach isn’t acidic enough the bottom valve won’t open, so the food sits there and ferments letting off gas and other nasties. The pressure then builds as the body tries to get things moving but, here the problem is that the top valve is weaker than the bottom one. So that means the extra pressure forces all these lovely fermenting gases up your throat!
Does this sound like what you experience?
So what is really causing acid to go back up your throat, is that it’s too weak! Sounds really strange but that’s the body for you isn’t it? This also explains why as people age they tend to suffer from more heartburn even though their stomach acid is getting weaker.
So is there any difference between heartburn and reflux? To put it simply…no. They’re just two names for the same thing. And if you’ve looked around and seen GERD everywhere and you’ve been wondering who the hell that is, it stands for gastro-esophageal reflux disease. So just another name for the same condition.
There’s a whole range of drugs, some of which work to relax the lower valve so that food passes through. This has been linked to fairly serious long term complications. Other treatments focus on increasing the strength of the stomach acid so that the bodies own processes work better.
I hope this information has been useful to you and if you want more information check out my blog here
I wish you all the best and relief form your heartburn.
Mark Syme
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