Heartburn may sneak up on you, or you may see it coming. Day or night, during or after meals, heartburn may strike. Preventing occasional heartburn can be as simple as a forgoing that nice Italian antipasto, or locking the fridge after dinner. Or, as millions of Americans do every day, you may grab an over-the-counter heartburn medicine. While some frequent heartburn sufferers may require prescription strength doses, others will find relief in the drugstore isle. Whatever your needs are, you have a number of options, medical and non-medical, to prevent your heartburn.
John Horn, PharmD, is a professor of pharmacy at the University of Washington School of Pharmacy. Below, he discusses different methods of heartburn treatments, and the benefits and limitations of each.
What do we mean when we complain of heartburn?
When people complain of heartburn, they're usually talking about a burning sensation that starts low in the chest and rises up beneath the sternum, sort of centrally located in the chest, and often it feels like it's an ascending, burning feeling.
Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is essentially heartburn and a number of other symptoms that are put together and labeled with the name GERD to describe it as a disease. It's often a diagnosis that's made by a physician, either after a careful physical examination and perhaps some invasive testing, and also based on the symptoms that a patient has.
Copyright 2009 NBC Health
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