Ugh, reflux symptoms every day, please help!

[Orange Lightning]

Hello everyone, I was on this forum a few months back but I have different symptoms now, which I really need to ask about.

Basically I'm frightened of having a chronic illness called LPR. It's like GERD/acid reflux, but it's almost incurable - only surgery can even slightly relieve it, and even then it's got a 50/50 chance of working at best. This is a big deal for me as I have a profound fear of being ill for life. It's also pretty tough to diagnose, but when you get it there's no way to get rid of it. I don't want to take meds, I don't want to change diets or lifestyle, I don't want to consider surgery and I don't want to have to live in fear of LPR or any illness. I just want my former life back.

Despite what I just said, I've been taking all the steps to try and figure out what is happening to me, as well as how to fix it all. My symptoms can occur when I'm niot anxious, but they sometimes fail to occur when my mind is stuck thinking about them! They are as follows:


- A burning throat at random times. There's no pattern to my diet or actions; sometimes the same food can make me burn one day but not another. The burning temporarily stops when I swallow but it quickly comes back. Even water sometimes causes it, and PPIs/H2 blockers can't stop it.

- Throat clearing after eating, and a tickly throat from time to time, usually right after...

- Belching. Constant, constant belching. If I take a sip of water, I belch. If I eat anything I belch. I belch as soon as I wake up and when I so much as stand up, or bend over, or wiggle. Again water alone causes it. The belches are strange - they go up into my throat as 'bubbles' and are released as tiny bubbles rather than one big burp. They almost always cause me to clear my throat or cause a sudden sore throat, but they themselves don't burn. In fact sometimes they temporarily stop the burning as they move up my throat.

- Sheer anxiety/depression over the fact I may have this illness for the rest of my life.


And these are the meds/changes I've tried:

- H2 Blockers/PPIs; 5 types in total across the whole year. No effect.
- Gaviscon Advance liquid. It can relieve the lump in the throat for a few minutes, but otherwise has no effect.
- Lifestyle and Diet changes from raising the bed to special reflux diets to fasting to limiting my activities and suchlike. Nothing works.
- Antidepressants of various kinds. All they do is make me tired; they aren't tackling the symptoms at all.
- CBT, hypnotherapy and other approaches. Nothing.


Tests include:

- Endoscopy. Clear
- Barium Swallow. Clear.
- ENT throat check. Clear.
- Rapid Spit Test. NOT CLEAR. Found stomach enzyme called "Pepsin" in my saliva. Only a trace amount, but that proves reflux was happening.
- Waiting on a 24 ph test and manometry.

I really find it hard to believe anxiety can cause me such real symptoms, especially since there are no patterns to it all, and it doesn't happen when I keep thinking about it. Likewise it can happen out of nowhere. when I'm sat enjoying myself, say watching a film or driving. Again, even water can cause it all. Alkaline filtered water even. The only thing that keeps me sane is the slight possibility of anxiety being behind this. Last year I had a roundabout problem relating to health anxiety about my heart. Because of that, nobody believes me, including my family and GP. They think my depression is an act, that I'm trying to get attention and that it's "all in my head."

It's not as easy as taking my mind off it all; if it was I'd be cured by now. It just hurts so much. I can't eat, drink or do anything I used to love. Food/Drink/Activity are quality of life itself; I miss so much of it all. I walk past people in the streets binging on junk food, many of them will probably never get ANYTHING wrong with them. These symptoms have cost me my friends and my dream job. This disease is testing my faith too; I stopped following my former religion because I just can't believe in a deity who would willingly let people suffer like this... I even went and found a scientific study saying that the quality of life for people with LPR is worse than those who survive heart attacks. Shocking, but true.

I'm only 22 - am I going to be like this for the rest of my life? Is it really possible stress could be behind all this, despite all I've mentioned? I concede my symptoms began during the most stressful part of my life, but I keep getting told on forums etc - and these are real words - "You have LPR. End of story. Stop deluding yourself. " What am I going to do? I don't want to just learn to cope or adjust, I want to be me again. No more fearing when symptoms will begin. No more limiting my quality of life. No more wishing myself dead every time the symptoms worsen. Just, no more symptoms, regardless of what they are.


...

Sorry to rant. Rant over. XD To summarise, has anyone else experienced reflux symptoms like me which tend to occur whether or not I am feeling anxious? Thank you for any help you can offer.

[Lee Grant Irons]

Hello OL,

Welcome back. We are sorry that you are sick. But you have come to the right place for support. What you wrote is not ranting. You gave a very logical description of what you have done so far. Yes, some of your anxiety is showing a bit. But that is okay. You are concerned and that is understandable. Please consider that the following possibilities are more common and thus more likely than LPR. In fact, I am guessing that many people who have been "diagnosed" with LPR might not have it. Doctors, in general, are not very good at doing differential diagnostic work. Part of the problem for this is that primary care doctors are too general and specialists are too specific, and so there are very few people who have sufficient knowledge in all areas of medicine to be able to do differential diagnosis work.

Thought 1: I experienced this for a period of time. Just as you, nothing helped. Then I discovered that some medicines can cause these symptoms as a side effect. I went off of the depression medicine, and my esophagus and throat symptoms went away.

Thought 2: I don't trust any gastroenterologist who says "all tests were negative." My experience with gastroenterologists is that they are just glorified plumbers. Wait minute... that would be insulting plumbers. They want to get you into surgery to scope you up one end and down the other, and once that is done, they have made in income about 99% of what they are going to get out of you. Getting you back into the office to do the hard work of diagnosis does not pay as much as getting a new patient in who has not been scoped yet, so they completely ignore "non-specific" findings in their tests and tell you everything is negative. I ALWAYS get copies of ALL of the tests done by ALL of my doctors and review them myself. For example, I have a son who was having pain and nausea associated with eating. We had a HIDA test done on his gallbladder that indicated an 81% ejection fraction (above 35% is "normal") with pain and nausea symptoms during the test. We consulted with a gastroenteroligist about this, and he completely ignored the symptoms and said that the gallbladder was fine because the ejection fraction was fine. So we had an upper endoscopy done by the gastroenterologist. The doctor had a nurse call us and tell us the test was negative and he did not need to see us in his office. So what was supposed to happen next? The doctor However, when I got my own copy of the test report, it indicated that he had slight gastritis in the bottom of his stomach. A review of everything that could cause this indicated one possibility of bile backing up into the stomach. So, I thought that maybe bile was backing up from his duodenum when he ate food and his gallbladder ejected bile. Considering we had already had EVERYTHING ELSE investigated over a 2 year period, this was the only logical alternative. So we had his gall bladder removed. Now my son is doing fine.

Thought 3: Considering all of your other tests were negative except for one that is still under review, I suggest that you maybe consider another possibility. You might be having spasming intestines that are preventing food and liquids from being efficiently pumped out of your stomach and duodenum. This can cause irritable bowel syndrome symptoms that take many different forms, including esophagus symptoms. Spasming intestines is a form of dysautonomia, which is a general medical term for malfunctioning of your autonomic nervous system. It is you autonomic nervous system that controls all of the automated muscle functions in your body, like you heart and you intestines. In general, any illness can result in come amount of dysautonomia. Long-term anxiety can especially lead to it. So if your food and water is not being pumped effeciently, this could result in what an engineer would call pump cavitation, which is just churning without any flow. This is what your clothes washer does. This generally results in a bunch of bubbles being generated. So if this is happening, you would likely having foaming occurring in your duodenum and stomach rising up your esophagus.

Thought 4: This goes with thought 3. I had bad irritable bowel syndrome for almost 5 years. Turns out, it was being caused by an improperly treated thyroid condition. A thyroid condition can also cause symptoms of anxiety. So you should get tested for this, as well as any other common ailment that can be initially detected through a basic blood test.

[backdoc]

Hi Lightning, had a similar problem as you have, the cure for me was getting a juicer and doing about 4 oz of cabbage juice 4-6 times a day...............best to you

[Orange Lightning]

Thank you for your replies. I just spoke to my GP about one of the issues; I'll go into more detail here.

Often whenever I bend over or crouch - say to open a safe, or when looking at my laptop screen - I belch quite a lot of the time. Furthermore, water makes me belch a lot, and sometimes the only air that escapes is a little, audible gurgle. My GP and some relatives of mine say they get this too, and that it is normal. It doesn't cause me much discomfort, apart from dislodging some mucus in my throat so I have to clear it, but it worries me all the same because it's so frequent.

Is it normal to sometimes belch when you put pressure on your stomach? And if not, can anxiety be the cause of more belching/potential reflux too? I guess I'm still begging it is anxiety before anything else, but it's worth asking. :p