Story at a Glance:
•Many pharmaceuticals on the market are automatically given to large numbers of patients despite the harms of these medications often greatly outweighing their benefits.
•One of the worst offenders are the acid suppressing medications, and their overprescription goes hand in hand with a widespread medical blindness to the critical functions of hydrochloric acid throughout the body and the actual causes of acid reflux.
•A variety of safe and non-invasive approaches exist to address the wide range of (often unrecognized) complications from acid reflux and dysfunctional stomach acid production.
Note: this article is a bit on the longer end, but since the stomach acid issues profoundly affect so many people, I felt I this article needed to be able to cover all the key points.
One of the more depressing parts of being an awake physician in the medical system is reading the drug lists of the patients you see and realizing how many prescriptions they are on that do not benefit them, and in many cases harm them. Presently, 66 percent of U.S. adults are estimated to have at least one prescription and on average, they have 9 prescriptions filled per year (which can include renewals of an existing one).
Since doctors are extremely reluctant to terminate existing prescriptions, this creates a scenario where people get placed on more and more drugs as they age (some of which are for treating the side effects of other drugs they are taking).
This situation is even worse for the elderly, who both have more time to be put on an increasing number of medicationso and due to their altered physiology are also the most vulnerable to the harmful effects of those mediations. For example, from 2009-2016, after 2 billions office visits were assessed, it was found that for adults over 65, 65.1% were on two or more drugs, 48.9% were on four or more, and 36.8% were on more than five (with the highest use occurring in the oldest Americans).
https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/stomach-acid-is-good-for-you