Acid Reflux (GERD) Medication Scandal?
Article referenced: http://is.gd/3MyIa
I was diagnosed with Acid Reflux Disease (GERD) in 2001. I vaguely remember drinking some hot coffee on the way to work one morning in the car. I was trying to take a sip when I hit a rather large pot hole or something and ended up taking a large gulp of the scolding hot coffee.
For the next couple of weeks, I experienced a lot of heartburn and it felt like my food was in my throat for a while after each meal; almost like it was standing in line to digest and wasn’t being kept in the stomach where it belonged.
I went to my doctor and he immediately prescribed Prilosec (OMEPRAZOLE) to me. After a few days on the drug, my symptoms went away and I was feeling great! The medicine really does work as advertised.
I stayed with it for about two months. I decided at that time that whatever had caused me to have these symptoms must have healed by then, so I stopped taking them. Within 48 hours, I started getting the worst sustained heartburn attacks that I have ever had.
The only way that I (and my doctor) could make sense of this is that I simply had an ongoing disease that meant that I would be on the medicine for the rest of my life. This made no sense to me since it was an injury that caused it in the first place. It wasn’t a disease.
About 7 years into the “treatment”, I started noticing that I was getting more acid reflux symptoms and some even felt like irregular heartbeats and heart attack symptoms. I went to my new doctor and his response was to double my dosage of Prilosec.
The new higher dosage did take away all of these symptoms but left me wondering why. I’m always a “why” kind of guy. Everything has an answer even if nobody knows it. The response that I’ve gotten from all of the docs so far was that there was no answer and this was just the reality that I need to live with,
This morning, I read this article about withdrawal symptoms to drugs like Prilosec. The information that it gave was exactly what I have been suspecting for years and even brought up to my doctor in my last visit.
I asked, “is it possible that the Prilosec is actually turning off my acid pumps and causing my body to adjust by just pushing out more when I miss a dosage?” I told him that I tried stopping it a few times and the acid reflux was much worse than it had ever been before.
He “assured” me that it was just the GERD disease and that the Prilosec is the treatment and not the cause.
I think that these doctors must be getting strong armed by the drug companies to push their meds or something. I’m going to attempt to take myself off the drug slowly by supplementing with regular antacids. I’ll need to stay away from acid enhancing foods while I do this.
Here’s how I plan to do it:
- Week 1 – decrease from 40mg to 20mg every other evening
- Week 2 – Decrease from 40mg to 20mg every evening
- Week 3 – Only take 1 20mg pill every evening
- Week 4 – only take 1 20mg pill every other evening’
Through this whole process, I will be eating a lot of Activia Yogurt, consuming standard antacids if needed, and staying away from foods that produce a lot of gas or acid.
I’m going to start this whole thing on October 18, 2009 and blog the progress here