Heartburn & Reflux For Dummies®
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2004103167
ISBN: 978-0-7645-5688-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Carol Ann Rinzler is a noted authority on health and nutrition and holds an MA from Columbia University. She writes a weekly nutrition column for the New York Daily News and is the author of more than 20 health-related books including Nutrition For Dummies, Controlling Cholesterol For Dummies, Weight Loss Kit For Dummies, and the highly acclaimed Estrogen and Breast Cancer: A Warning to Women. Rinzler lives in New York with her husband, wine writer Perry Luntz, and their amiable cat, Kat.
Ken DeVault, MD is a Professor of Medicine and has been active in research and education in the area of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) for over 20 years. Dr. DeVault conducts research on topics that include the acute and chronic treatment of gastroesophageal reflux, Barrett’s Esophagus, and esophageal motility. He has a particular interest in esophageal diseases in an aging population. Publishing extensively since the late 1980s, Dr. DeVault has written over 150 book chapters, abstracts, editorials, and original articles. He is the co-author of the American College of Gastroenterology’s Guideline Statement on GERD, which is now in its third edition.
Dr. DeVault received his undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee and his medical degree from the Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Vanderbilt University and completed a combined clinical and research fellowship at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, PA. He is a Trustee and Fellow of the American College of Gastroenterology and serves on committees of the American College of Gastroenterology, American Gastroenterological Association, and American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.
For my husband, Perry Luntz.
This new project of Heartburn & Reflux For Dummies has given me the opportunity to work with yet another group of thoroughly pleasant professionals at the For Dummies group at Wiley Publishing, Inc. Acquisitions Editor Natasha Graf was a joy to work with as were Project Editor Mike Baker and Copy Editor Chad Sievers. I’m truly indebted to Ken DeVault for his careful and valuable comments on the medical aspects of this book. One is lucky indeed to find such as skillful contributor. I also thank Robert Rakel for serving as the technical reviewer. I also am grateful to the National Heartburn Alliance for their help during this project.
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our Dummies online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development
Project Editor: Mike Baker
Acquisitions Editor: Natasha Graf
Copy Editor: Chad Sievers
Technical Reviewer: Robert Rakel, MD
Editorial Manager: Jennifer Ehrlich
Editorial Assistants: Courtney Allen, Elizabeth Rea
Cover Photos: © PHOTOTAKE Inc./Alamy
Cartoons: Rich Tennant, www.the5thwave.com
Composition
Project Coordinator: Maridee Ennis
Layout and Graphics: Andrea Dahl, Denny Hager, Stephanie D. Jumper, Brent Savage, Jacque Schneider, Janet Seib, Mary Gillot Virgin
Special Art: Kathryn Born
Proofreaders: Andy Hollandbeck, Carl Pierce, Dwight Ramsey, Brian Walls, TECHBOOKS Production Services
Indexer: TECHBOOKS Production Services
Special Help
Christina Guthrie, Natalie F. Harris, Laura Miller
Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies
Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies
Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director, Consumer Dummies
Kristin A. Cocks, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies
Michael Spring, Vice President and Publisher, Travel
Brice Gosnell, Associate Publisher, Travel
Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel
Publishing for Technology Dummies
Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher, Dummies Technology/General User
Composition Services
Gerry Fahey, Vice President of Production Services
Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Title
Introduction
About This Book
Conventions Used in This Book
What You’re Not to Read
Foolish Assumptions
How This Book Is Organized
Icons Used in This Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I : Naming Your Pain
Chapter 1: Picturing Heartburn and Reflux
Meeting Your Heartburn
Pinning the Tail on the Heartburn Donkey
Looking for Help in All the Right Places
Chapter 2: Tracking Your Digestive Tract
Defining Digestion
Testing the Protectors
Examining the LES
Chapter 3: Cataloging the Symptoms and Hazards of Heartburn, Reflux, and GERD
Tracking the Symptoms
Calculating Long-Term Consequences
Chapter 4: Rating Your Reflux Risk
Picturing People with Heartburn
Factoring In the Family
Rendering a Gender Bias
Mentioning Medical Risks
Weighing Weight’s Weight on Reflux
Pinpointing Problem Eaters
Adding Up Your Own Reflux Risk
Part II : Eating Your Way to Relief
Chapter 5: Meeting Your Nutrition Needs
Measuring Nutrition
Beginning with the Big Guys
Investigating Vitamins
Mining the Minerals
Supplementing the Info
Chapter 6: Fine-Tuning Your Diet
Enjoying Food
Explaining How Food and Drink Can Cause Heartburn
Naming the Guilty Parties
Making Meals Safer
Choosing the Safest Cooking Technique
Chapter 7: Reviewing Home Remedies, Alternative Approaches, and Herbal Healers
Grading Granny’s Goodies
Looking for Alternatives
Evaluating Herbal Medicine
Linking Other Alternative Approaches to Heartburn/Reflux
Part III : Treating Your Middle
Chapter 8: Finding the Right Doctor
Deciding When to See the Doctor
Sorting Through the Heartburn Specialists
Choosing a Doctor
Going to the Doctor with Your History in Hand
Chapter 9: Examining Your Esophagus and Testing Your Tummy
Picking Potential Patients
Assessing Your Acidity
Measuring Your Muscle Strength
Studying Your Stomach
Evaluating Your Esophagus
Chapter 10: Prescribing Relief
Noting the Cost of Heartburn Help
Aiming for Neutrality with Antacids
Blocking the Burn
Slowing the Pump
Interesting Interacting
Chapter 11: Avoiding Problem Pills
Pinpointing Potential Problems
Naming Medicines That Loosen the LES
Targeting Traffic Stoppers
Listing Irritating Drugs and Supplements
Naming Medical Conditions That May Make Meds Stick
Minimizing the Heartburn Effects of Essential Medicines
Chapter 12: Exploring Surgical Options
Nominating Candidates for Heartburn Surgery
Setting a Surgical Schedule
Cutting and Pasting: Fundoplication
Meeting the Morning After
Reaching Home Base
Balancing Risks and Benefits
Peering into the Reflux Crystal Ball
Part IV : Creating a Comfortable Lifestyle
Chapter 13: Building a Better Body
Answering Question Numero Uno: Who’s Overweight?
Choosing a Healthful Weight Control Program
Working Off Your Reflux
Chapter 14: Healing Heartburn with Healthy Habits
Snuffing Out Heartburn
Toasting the Pain-Free Life
Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
Chapter 15: Stressing Stress Relief
Stressing the Importance of Stress
Activating Your Adrenals
Linking Stress to Heartburn
Unlocking Your Stomach from Your Stress
Chapter 16: Fashioning (and Furnishing) a Comfortable Life
Burning Your Bra and Loosening Your Belt
Looking Good, Feeling Fine
Finding Furniture That Fights Heartburn
Part V : Meeting the Special Cases
Chapter 17: Handling the Heartburn of Pregnancy
Are All Pregnant Women at Risk for Reflux?
Avoiding Unnecessary Tests
Determining Safe Remedies
De-Linking Your Lifestyle from Your Reflux
Chapter 18: Finding Heartburn in Infants and Children
Naming What’s Making Your Child Cry
Diagnosing Reflux in Children
Treating Children with Reflux
Chapter 19: Taking Aim at Senior Heartburn
Aging into Heartburn
Identifying the Risk Factors in Older Folk
Diagnosing Heartburn in Older Patients
Treating Senior Heartburn
Part VI : The Part of Tens
Chapter 20: Ten or So Heartburn and Reflux Myths
Heartburn Is Common, So It’s Nothing to Worry About
Heartburn and Reflux Inevitably Lead to Cancer
Only Overweight People, Drinkers, and Chiliheads Get Heartburn and Reflux
Smoking a Cigarette After Eating Prevents Heartburn
Heartburn Is an Inevitable Part of Growing Older
OTC Antacids Aren’t Real Medicine
Taking Prescription Heartburn and Reflux Drugs Makes Digesting Food More Difficult
Having Nighttime Heartburn Means You Should Sleep Sitting Up
Love Coffee? Got Heartburn? Switch to Decaf
To Avoid Heartburn After Eating, Relax
Having Heartburn during Pregnancy Means Giving Birth to a Hairy Baby
Heartburn Is Connected to the Heart
Chapter 21: Ten Heartburn Web Sites
The National Heartburn Alliance
International Foundation for Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders
HelpHeartburn.com
GERD Information Center
The American Gastroenterological Association
The American College of Gastroenterology
American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE)
North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition
American Academy of Family Physicians
The American Dietetic Association
The Food and Drug Administration
Chapter 22: Ten Sometimes Painful, Often Annoying, but Almost Never Fatal Digestive Disorders
Appendicitis
Bezoar
Constipation and Diarrhea
Gas (Flatulence)
Globus Sensation
Hemorrhoids
Hiccups
Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)
Glossary
Heartburn is a pain. When you have heartburn, eating the food you like best, working at top speed, or enjoying activities with your family, friends, and significant others can be difficult. That’s the bad news.
But heartburn can be helped. You have all sorts of options: Carefully editing your diet, eating smaller meals, loosening your belt, or working with your doctor to find effective medicine can help you to eat the foods you like, work at top speed, and yes, enjoy extracurricular activities with family, friends, and significant others. That’s the good news.
The great news is that Heartburn & Reflux For Dummies spells it all out.
Heartburn & Reflux For Dummies isn’t a medical textbook, so you don’t have to go to medical school or be a science wiz in order to get through it. Instead, the book aims to give you — in an easily digestible form — the information that you need to make sensible choices about how to handle that annoying pain in your middle.
More than 60 million Americans experience heartburn every year, but that doesn’t mean they’re all experts on the subject. For readers who know absolutely nothing about heartburn except that it hurts, I offer basic definitions and explanations in this book. For those of you who know more than a little about heartburn, this book is both a refresher course and a guide to the latest skinny on reflux. For everyone, this book is packed with nuggets of fascinating stuff like the biography of the man who invented heartburn surgery and a quiz on movies about babies. (In the chapter on infants with heartburn, of course.)
My goal is to help you recognize and treat a condition that may range from simply annoying to unpleasantly painful to potentially hazardous to your overall health. Giving you the ammo you need to soothe your aching middle and prevent future complications means laying out the facts and then sticking in a bit of air (like that movie quiz) so you can take a deep breath and move on to even more facts — like how to live a happy, healthy life even if Mother Nature tosses heartburn in your path.
This book is a great guide to understanding and handling heartburn, reflux, and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). But you don’t have to stop here. I provide you with all kinds of additional sources for assistance that you can use your phone, modem, and mail carrier to access.
Please note that the material in this book is for your information only. When it comes to medical advice, your most certain guide is your doctor, the person most familiar with your health and your medical needs. In addition, except where specifically noted, the material in this book applies to adults.
To help you navigate your way through this book, I use the following conventions:
Italic is used for emphasis and to highlight new words or terms that are defined.
Boldfaced text is used to indicate keywords in bulleted lists or the action part of numbered steps.
Monofont is used for Web addresses.
One more thing: I provide you with tons of Web sites in this book that you can use to get even more information on various heartburn-related topics. But, nowadays, Web addresses seem to have the shelf life of freshly baked bread. They can be great one day and stale the next. So, if you happen to find a specific address in this book that they’ve changed on us, I suggest scaling it back by going to the main site — the part of the address that ends in .com, .org, or .edu — and snooping around a bit.
Yes, you read that right. You don’t have to read every single word I’ve written here. Some small parts of this title are fun and informative but not necessarily vital to your understanding of heartburn.
Text in sidebars: Sidebars, which look like text enclosed in a shaded gray box, appear here and there throughout the book. I like them, and I think you will too, but your functional knowledge of heartburn won’t be adversely affected should you walk on by.
Anything accompanied by a Technical Stuff icon: This info is good (really good) but not critical to getting a handle on heartburn.
The barcodes on the back of the book: I’m not sure who put those there, but I know that I didn’t. So, you have my permission not to read them.
Every book is written with a particular reader in mind, and this one is no different. As I wrote it, I made the following basic assumptions about who you are and why you plunked down your hard-earned cash for a 300+ page book about heartburn.
You don’t have a medical degree, but you’ve decided it would be smart to know more about why you hurt.
You’ve changed your diet and tried all the antiheartburn drugs you can get without a prescription, and now you think it’s time to figure out where to go for serious advice.
You want basic information about heartburn, the people who treat it, and the medicines that relieve it.
You’ve been recently diagnosed with heartburn or acid reflux disease or think you may have it.
The following is a brief summary of each part in Heartburn & Reflux For Dummies. You can use this information as a “quick pick” guide to check out what you want to read first.
In Chapter 1, I give you an overview of practically everything you need to know about heartburn, including stats on how many of your fellow citizens are in the Heartburn Boat with you. Chapter 2 presents a really clear guide to your digestive organs — including the ones that hurt when heartburn hits. In Chapter 3, I list heartburn’s symptoms and (sorry about this) the potential consequences. And I reserve Chapter 4 for naming names — telling you who’s at risk, and why.
I start this part by covering nutrition in Chapter 5, telling you everything you need to know about the nutrients that enable your body to run in tip-top condition. Then, in Chapter 6, I help you adapt your diet to give you essential nutrients while avoiding reflux. Finally, Chapter 7 is a really interesting compilation of home remedies (including some foods) for heartburn. (For your amusement, I include some curiosities, such as an old-time herbal recipe for a heartburn cure, which is so yucky that when you read it, you’ll see that this remedy is definitely something that you shouldn’t try on your own!)
Chapter 8 is a straightforward guide to finding and working with doctors for heartburn relief. Chapter 9 lists the tests that the doctor is likely to suggest to pinpoint the source of your tummy troubles. Chapter 10 is a catalog of heartburn medicines, and Chapter 11 gives you a catalog of drugs that can actually give you heartburn. Chapter 12 (snip, snip) explains surgical remedies for heartburn.
Chapter 13 tells you how to make your body strong and supple, which certainly sounds nice, in relation to your quest to conquer heartburn. In Chapter 14, I talk about how to deal with unhealthy habits such as smoking. Chapter 15 lays out stratagems for avoiding stress. Chapter 16 tells you how to furnish your home and clothe your body without triggering heartburn.
Heartburn isn’t a one-size-fits-all condition. Some folks, in special circumstances, have special problems that require special solutions. Chapter 17 discusses the special risks and remedies for heartburn during pregnancy. Chapter 18 examines the littlest heartburn sufferers: infants and children. Chapter 19 approaches heartburn among the aging.
In true For Dummies fashion, I get out my top-ten lists for this part. Chapter 20 debunks heartburn myths, some of which you may still believe are true. In Chapter 21, I provide a list of really reliable Web sites for people with digestive disorders. And Chapter 22 lists common digestive conditions you probably don’t have — but should know about, just in case they pop up in your future. Or in the life of someone near and dear to you.
Icons are a useful For Dummies way to catch your attention and highlight information. They come in various shapes and forms.
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One of the best things (among many) about a For Dummies book is that each chapter is a self-contained unit. You don’t have to start at Chapter 1 and work through the rest of the book in order. And you don’t have to read it cover to cover to benefit from the information. You can dive right in anywhere and be certain of finding everything you need to know about the subject at hand. Splash!
In this part . . .
To start healing the burn, you need to know the basic facts about heartburn, reflux, and gastroesophageal reflux disease, a real mouthful that’s usually abbreviated as GERD. This part defines heartburn, explains the workings of your digestive tract, lists the symptoms and consequences, and tells you who’s at risk.