How I Healed GERD & Stopped Taking PPIs (After 10 Years) | My GERD Story & How I Cured My GERD

hi my name is Tori and I am a doctor of physical therapy who specializes in pelvic dysfunction which means that I treat things that can go wrong around the pelvis today however I am going to be talking about my experience with curd with gastro esophageal reflux disease which is chronic heartburn chronic acid reflux I'm gonna talk about how I was able to heal my GERD and how I was able to stop using proton pump inhibitors PPIs after using them every day for ten years and I want this video to be through the lens of me sharing anecdotal evidence of me sharing my own personal experience with GERD and healing myself and not through the lens of expertise because the upper GI system is not my area of expertise also I am sitting in this bizarre lean position because I am currently recovering from a pelvic injury myself of all things I'm thirteen weeks into recovery I'm doing a lot better like significantly better but I'm not out of the woods yet and part of my recovery is not sitting for prolonged periods of time so when I do sit I have to kind of sit on my side that's why I'm kind of like in this leaned position for this video it's just a lot nicer to film seated like I like this vibe a lot more than standing so I'm leaning into it today so I am really excited and honored to be making today's video I am making it because it has been requested multiple times so thank you so much for requesting it seriously it means the world to me but I also want to say that I have been hesitant about creating this video because GI systems are so unique and individual in nature and gerd is also very unique and individual in nature and I am lucky because I figured out the root cause of my GERD and I figured out how to heal and how to set up the right for my body and my gut and I do want to add my voice to the discussion but I have to put it out on the table right off the bat this will not be everybody's experience because my gut is my gut and my GERD is my GERD and so if you watch this and you realize that this isn't really helpful for you that this isn't really gonna work for you don't be discouraged recognize that we have different GI systems we probably have different root causes at play for our GERD and if this doesn't work for you I hope that that's okay and that you can feel that you're just one step closer to finding out what actually does so with all of that being said I want to take this video and cover three main topics the first topic that I want to talk about is my backstory what happened and kind of what motivated me to try and keel my garden to get off of pee-pee eyes I also want to talk about exactly how I healed GERD and exactly how I was able to get off of pee-pee eyes after using them for 10 years in case this video does resonate with you in case you are curious to see if maybe this will work for you I want it to be incredibly explicit so that you understand and you have starting off point with the supervision of a physician or another healthcare provider who knows you and the last topic that I want to cover is just looking at what didn't work for me and talking a little bit about healing from a chronic condition because when the first thing or the second thing or the third thing that you try don't work it can get really discouraging and really disheartening really fast and so I I just have a few words that I'd like to share on that topic so I'll include timestamps in the description below and without further ado I'll start with my back story and how I got motivated to heal my GERD so I got diagnosed with GERD at a really young age I don't remember all of the specifics I just remember being 16 and mentioning heartburn to my parents and my parents being like you're awfully young to be having acid reflux and I remember going into my physician's office and my physician prescribing me peepee eyes prescribing me proton pump inhibitors specifically prevacid and prevacid is an over-the-counter drug I was just on a prescription-strength previs said I was taking 30 milligrams every day and so my parents were in support of me taking it my physician was telling me to take it and I was 16 and I didn't really know yet how I felt about prolonged use of pharmaceuticals I didn't really know yet how I felt about my body you know and so the authority figures in my life were telling me to do it so I did it and I don't blame any of them for the outcome I really think that all parties involved were acting with my best interests at heart I think that they were doing the best that they could with the information that they had and so I'm not upset with them I harbor no ill feelings I don't blame them for any of it it was just one of those things I was sixteen I was told to do it so I did and I didn't really think anything of it and as the years went by it became apparent to me that it was getting worse not because I had to take more prevacid in order to feel better but because when I didn't take the prevacid like if I forgot one morning to take my pill everything gave me heartburn not just the notoriously acidic foods like coffee and tomato sauce like everything I would have a banana and get heartburn I would drink water and get heartburn it seemed like anything that I put into my digestive system the output would be heartburn and that was alarming but not alarming enough to push me to try and cure the GERD it was just something that I realized was happening took note of and kind of tucked away in the back of my brain for later and so it wasn't until my early to mid-20s when I was trying to heal myself from chronic urinary tract infections I have other videos up about my experience with chronic UTI I'll link up here if you want to check out how I cured my chronic UTIs without antibiotics but it wasn't until I was trying to cure my UTIs and I had started learning and researching and just educating myself about what happens to your body when you take antibiotics over a long period of time and I started to question well if taking consistent antibiotics isn't good for you is taking a PPI every morning good for you and that prompted me to look into the adverse effects of ppis and that led me to some studies that were correlating long-term use of PP eyes and osteoporosis and for those of you who don't know osteoporosis is the weakening of your bones it's a change in bone density where the bones become kind of spongy and Swiss cheesy instead of firm and dense and so that prompted me to get a bone density scan I became very motivated to take a pulse on my bone density and see where I was I'm not gonna link to those studies because there is some dispute within the scientific community as to whether or not they are valid reliable studies but regardless that's what that's what motivated me to get a bone density scan so I got a bone density scan when I was 24 or 25 I think and it turns out that I was osteo penis at 25 so osteopenia is kind of the middle on a spectrum if really healthy bone density is here and osteoporosis is here osteopenia is that middle space so I was an osteoporotic but I certainly wasn't where you would expect otherwise healthy 25 year old to be so that was a real wake-up call and it really was the combination of learning that I was osteo penis from what I was assuming was chronic use of pee pee eyes and knowing in the back of my head that it getting worse that I really couldn't anything and not get heartburn if I wasn't taking a PPI it was that combination that really pushed me motivated me and made me be like okay you need to figure this out you need to get off of pee-pee ice so then my next step how did I piece together what was causing my GERD and how did I figure out how to get off of PP eyes I have the personality type where when something is wrong with me I need to understand it in every way every facet that I possibly can so I started doing a lot of research into the why why was I getting acid reflux what was going on in my system what were the potential causes so if you can imagine the upper GI system as just three parts technically part of your small intestine is part of the upper GI system but for simplicity's sake we're just gonna ignore that and take the upper GI system and focus on three parts your mouth your esophagus which is the tube that connects your mouth to your stomach and your stomach just those three parts of the upper GI system I learned that usually with GERD usually heartburn acid reflux is due to dysfunction in something called your lower esophageal sphincter so if you can imagine mouth esophagus stomach there is a sphincter right where your esophagus meets your stomach and that's Fink tur you can kind of think of it as a doorway in a really normal healthy upper GI system when you eat food and that food makes its way down your esophagus and into your stomach that lower esophageal sphincter that door is going to close so that the contents of your stomach don't go back up into your esophagus your stomach is acidic and if the contents of your stomach make their way back up into your esophagus it's gonna burn it's gonna hurt and so usually someone who has gastro esophageal reflux disease or GERD has something going wrong with that lower esophageal sphincter it's not closing correctly for one reason or another the contents of his or her stomach are then coming up into his or her esophagus and hurting so I started to wonder what could be causing dysfunction in my lower esophageal sphincter why would my lower esophageal sphincter not know to close and so I started looking into research and reasoning behind that question and while there are more than one answers to this question the one that I think was right for me had to do with stomach acidity so I for a long time thought that the reason that I had acid reflux is because my stomach was producing too much acid and what I learned is that it's really probably the opposite that was true for me so like I was saying when you eat something it goes in your mouth down your esophagus and into your stomach what I learned is that there is a feedback loop that triggers that lower esophageal sphincter to close and what triggers that feedback loop is a certain amount of acidity in your stomach a certain level of pH that tells your esophagus hey it's time to close that lower sphincter because the stomach's gonna do its thing now the stomach is gonna produce a bunch of acid and start to turn whatever you ate into liquid so that it can be digested later so what I learned is that if your stomach isn't producing enough acid if you're producing less acid then you should be then your pH never gets to that level that tells your lower esophageal sphincter to close and so it started to make sense to me that oh it's not that my sphincter is dysfunctional it's that my stomach isn't producing enough acid and when I pieced those two things together I was astounded by the prospect of taking proton pump inhibitors because proton pump inhibitors work by disrupting the production of acid in your stomach there's a cascade of events a series of events that takes place in your stomach in order to produce acid and pipi ice work by essentially stopping the very last step of that series of and so when you take PP eyes you produce less acid in your stomach and I started to kind of piece it all together and realize that when I took PP eyes I wasn't experiencing heartburn not because my lower esophageal sphincter was just suddenly working but because my stomach was producing so little acid that whatever did come up into my esophagus didn't hurt me anymore and that just made me question digestion and overall gut health you know I was already osteo Pinnock what was the long-term projection of my gut health gonna look like if I didn't figure out how to cure my GERD with some other means and get off of these PP eyes so really understanding what was going on with me or at least what I thought was going on with me and my body was important for me to connect my own dots and make the next link the next step in my healing and I really started to wonder well what I was going on when I was 16 years old what was changing in my medical history in my health at age 16 that could have prompted this low acid production and it felt like a stretch at the time but the only thing that I could think of that changed in my health when I was 16 was birth control that's when I started taking hormonal birth control and I actually made a separate video a while ago talking about hormonal birth control and its connection to God hell I'll link to it up here as well but the long and short of it is that there is a connection between hormonal birth control and gut health and so I started to wonder what would change if I stopped taking hormonal birth control and I'm lucky because I was taking birth control simply to not become pregnant so it's not like I had an underlying medical condition and that's why I was taking birth control I was able to stop taking it safely and that was huge and the experience of getting off of hormonal birth control is a story in and of itself I made a different video about that you can also check that out if you want to learn more about what that was like for me but that was the impetus of me getting off of birth control I learned more about different causes of GERD I learned more about what I thought was probably my specific cause of lower esophageal sphincter dysfunction and that led me to okay let's get off of hormonal birth control then so that was one part of the equation the other part of the equation was figuring out how to get off of proton pump inhibitors at first I thought that I could just stop I thought that I could just cut them out cold turkey like oh look at me I'm young my body will bounce back I'll figure it out and if anyone watching has tried that it doesn't work something happens called acid rebound and acid rebound is really really intense heartburn like heartburn unlike anything I've ever experienced it was so painful I thought that something was seriously wrong with me but essentially your body is always trying to maintain balance there's a scientific word for balance in the body systems called homeostasis and that's essentially your body's main goal and so you can imagine if you're taking something that constantly lowers the amount of acid that your stomach produces and then you take it away quickly your body responds by producing a ton of acid and in my case and I think in most people's cases if it really is low acidity in the stomach that's causing the heartburn it's still not enough acidity to close the sphincter but now it's just so much more than what you're used to and so when I tried to stop cold turkey I just acid rebound to no avail and so I was glad that I tried that and failed because it became very very clear that I was going to need to do this slowly that I was going to need to wean off of PPIs at a turtle's pace and not a hair's pace so that was challenging but ended up being a good thing and eventually what I came to kind of of my own devise was a weaning schedule and I do want to say one more time it's really important that you discuss this with a health care provider who knows you and your past medical history I don't want you to watch this video and just decide that this is what you should do please talk to a physician who knows you or a different health care provider who you trust and just make sure that it's safe for you to do so what I decided to do was to very very slowly decrease the dosage of PPIs and replace them with h2 blockers and for those of you who don't know there are kind of different levels different tiers of antacids of the drugs that are used to prevent heartburn and ppis are cream of the crop they are really fast acting they're really intense in the way that they work and then below them kind of the the next tier down are h2 blockers h2 blockers also decrease the amount of acidity in your stomach just not to the same extent and not as quickly as PP eyes do and so I thought that I could kind of go on this projection of PP eyes h2 blockers hopefully nothing and so the first thing that I did is I split my dosage up instead of taking 130 milligram pill in the morning I was able to find 15 milligram prevacid pills over the counter at my local pharmacy and what I did is I took 115 milligram pill in the morning and then 115 milligram pill with lunch and that way I was still getting my 30 milligrams I was just splitting up the dosage throughout the day and that's really like routine as evidenced with acid rebound cuts don't like it when you drastically change up what you're doing so I did that for I want to say like ten days to two weeks and then I was able to find a different PPI over-the-counter called omeprazole and I found 20 milligram omeprazole pills being sold as pills not capsules and it was important to me to find a pill because I didn't want a 20 milligram dose I wanted a 10 milligram dose and let me also pause here and say that even though I said and omeprazole have different names they have the same mechanism of action they are both peepee eyes and so it wasn't of concern to me that I was taking different named peepee eyes I just wanted to make sure that I had the same mechanism of action behind the pill that I was taking if that makes sense so I found the 20 milligram omeprazole pills and I was cutting them in half to the best of my abilities I was using these really small sewing scissors and I found out later that you can just buy a pill cutter that probably would have been easier like it's a better thing to do but I was just cutting them with these scissors so I had my 15 milligram prevacid pill that I was taking in the morning and then I cut my 20 milligram omeprazole pills into 10 milligram pills and my next step was to replace the afternoon 15 milligram prevacid with a 10 milligram MF result I did that for another two weeks or so and then I started taking a 10 milligram dose of a MEP result in the morning and a 10 milligram dose of omeprazole in the afternoon I did that for two weeks or so and then I decided to take my already cut little 10 milligram omeprazole pills and try and cut them in half to make 5 milligram omeprazole pills so that I could go down to the next step in the weaning process which would be 10 milligrams of omeprazole in the morning 5 milligrams of omeprazole in the afternoon and I think it was around this time where I was starting to get some breakthrough heartburn and I was able to control that breakthrough heartburn with pepcid pepcid is a chewable over-the-counter h2 blocker so I was just taking pepcid when I needed to control any sort of breakthrough heartburn that I was getting during this time so 10 milligrams of a Metra's all in the morning 5 milligrams of omeprazole in the afternoon and pepcid when I needed it then I decided that the next thing that I would try to do is replace one of those doses of PPIs with an h2 blocker and I chose the UNTAC you and I kind of switched up who and I was taking the PPI so my next step after the 10 and 5 milligrams of omeprazole was to take one zantac in the morning take 10 milligrams of omeprazole in the afternoon and then take pepcid whenever I needed it so I did that for another 2 weeks or so then I took zantac in the morning and 5 milligrams of omeprazole in the afternoon and pepcid whenever I needed it and then I took just the zantac in the morning no pee pee eyes whatsoever and pepcid whenever I needed it and at this point by this point I had been off of hormonal birth control for a couple of months and I thought that it would be worth trying worthwhile just to see what happened if I only took pepcid when I needed it instead of starting my day with his antic with a different h2 blocker and so that's what I tried and that worked pretty well for me I was taking pepcid frequently ish throughout the day couple times throughout the day and slowly over time that significantly decreased to where I am now I think it's probably an over estimate to say that I'm taking pepcid once a month I really rarely have to use it now I'm able to drink coffee and eat tomato sauce and other notoriously acidic foods along with foods that really shouldn't cause heartburn without getting heartburn it's really very few and far between occasions where I need pepsin for whatever it is that I ate and that's what worked for me pinpointing the hormonal birth control as a potential trigger for my low stomach acid production and pairing eliminating that trigger with a weaning schedule to get myself off of pee-pee eyes is ultimately what helped me cure my GERD and get my body to no longer depend on the PP eyes and like I said that is what worked for me but guts and GI systems are very very individual and the last topic that I wanted to talk about just very briefly is that healing from a chronic condition is challenging it's challenging physically yes but it's also very challenging mentally and I want you to know that what ended up working for me was not the first thing that I tried I tried the cold turkey which didn't work at all that was a blatant failure I also ended up trying different digestive enzymes and digestive bitters I thought that maybe what was actually going on was poor digestion of food so I tried that supplementation it didn't work for me I also tried other supplements that are supposed to help lower your stomach pH that are supposed to help with the acid production in your stomach I tried supplement routines along that line through that lens that also didn't work for me and so nailing the hormonal birth control as a trigger and then setting up this PPI weaning process was I think the fourth thing that I tried and the reason I bring that up is because it is so easy to get discouraged and disheartened when you're trying to heal something that feels so mysterious that feels like it's just been a part of your life for so long and when the first treatment that you try or the second treatment that you try doesn't work it's just easy to feel like there's no hope for you that you're too far along and I just wanted to say try not to give up on yourself try to believe in your body's ability to heal try to commit to the idea that you are capable of healing and one of the things that really has helped me in the past heal from seemingly chronic conditions chronic UTIs GERD and right now I will make videos about this in the future but I am healing right now from something that I think is often diagnosed as a chronic condition so as someone with some experience with with chronic conditions what really has helped me is looking at treatments as true experiments really trials and errors instead of the be-all and to my healing and when I look at it through that lens when I look at it like okay I'm gonna try this new treatment I'm gonna run an experiment and see if I can change my healing trajectory if it fails I can look at that as a positive thing instead of a negative thing I can look at that and say to myself okay that wasn't the answer but that means that I'm one step closer to figuring out whatever it is that the answer actually is and so just that really gentle shift in my mindset that really gentle shift in my perspective has made a huge difference in my mental success in healing from chronic conditions and I just wanted to end on that note you are so much more powerful than you think you are your body is so much more capable than you think it is and it's okay if what I've outlined in this video doesn't work for you and it's okay if you have to try multiple techniques before you figure out what does on that note thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed this video or found it helpful please don't forget to like it give it a thumbs up and share it if you have questions or even content suggestions things that you'd like to see on this channel please let me know in the comment section down below I do try really hard to read and respond to all of my comments also don't forget to check me out on Instagram and please subscribe to my channel for more content not only about life things like today's video but also about pelvic things thank you again so much for watching I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will see you in the next video bye [Music]

Channel: Pelvic Empowerment

Views: 138,100

Keywords: GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disease, proton pump inhibitor, acid reflux treatment, gerd story, how i cured my gerd, gerd treatment, gerd experience, healing gerd, gerd healing, gerd, acid reflux remedies, proton pump inhibitors side effects, proton pump inhibitors vs h2 blockers, how do you cure GERD permanently, how to cure gerd permanently, how I cured my acid reflux, is gerd curable, is gerd curable or not, how gerd is cured, h2 blockers, h2 blockers vs ppi

Id: CE2_N7EBX7k

Length: 28min 46sec (1726 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020