The Basics Of Acid Reflux
Each person will experience acid reflux at some point in his life. It seems that that is an accepted fact. Common reflux occurrences happen when a person has eaten a heavy meal and his gastric acids travel up the esophagus. While acid reflux itself may be a common occurrence and not a cause for alarm, frequent, sometimes unexplainable acid reflux could be a sign of something else that should not be ignored.
The human body is made in a way that all the parts and its functions serve us. They serve the individual and all the small parts up to the big parts work together to make sure that the body is function at its optimum. The stomach produces acids in order to break down the food that we eat and the acids, when they are not helping in digestion, should stay in the stomach. In order to make sure that that happens, at the end of our esophagus leading to the stomach, we have what we call an esophageal sphincter. The sphincter is a valve at the end of the esophagus that is supposed to close off the stomach from the esophagus once it has allowed the passage of food from one organ to another.
When acid reflux happens, the sphincter loosens and the loosening up allows for gastric acids to travel back up instead of just staying in the stomach. Do you remember those common acid reflux cases mentioned earlier? That is commonly happens when a person is full of has eaten a heavy meal? Well that happens because when the stomach is full, it stretches and the sphincter loosens and allows acid to backflow. When the sphincter loosens up on its own, and it happens frequently, it can bring about one of the most common illnesses associated to acid reflux and that is heartburn.
Heartburn is characterized by a pain in the chest that is caused by acid reflux. Sometimes it is described by some patients as a searing pain that starts in the stomach and extends all the way up to the neck. For other sufferers, they describe the pain as a pain in the chest that increases in intensity and sometimes extends to the back. Many heartburn sufferers sometimes mistake the pain that they are feeling as symptoms of a heart attack.
The basic difference between a heart attack and heartburn is that heartburns are pains in the chest, they do not include shortness of breath, nausea, pain in the arm or the jaw. If you experience chest pains with any other symptoms, it would be a good idea to check with a doctor.
There are many remedies available to people suffering from acid reflux. There are numerous over-the-counter drugs and for cases that happen every now and then but for intense cases of acid reflux, you can get a doctor to prescribe you medication because there may be some instances where the acids cause parts of the esophagus to get ulcers and medication needs to be prescribed to heal those.
Almost all medical professionals agree that the best way to prevent acid reflux is to change your diet and change your lifestyle. There are also several guides out there that give concise recommendations on how to deal with this issue - for example, take a look at this heartburn no more review for more details.