Are You Ready For Acid Reflux Surgery?
By
The Acid Reflux Team
Acid reflux disease can greatly disrupt the quality of your life, especially keeping you awake at nights. But should you consider surgery? Yes, there is a kind of surgery for disease, but it usually considered a last resort, when all other medications and treatments have failed. Any time your body is opened up, you risk getting an internal infection, or other complications. Make this choice carefully with your doctor or internist. Sometimes surgery is the only option for those sufferers who have difficulty taking medication, or if their esophagus has been too damaged for any medication to help. Can You Handle The Truth? You be evaluated for surgery before you go under the knife. Believe it or not, your doctors don’t really want to risk you getting any worse than you already are. You will have to undergo some tests to determine if you can be helped by surgery. These will often include tests to look at your pH (acid) levels, a barium x-ray (most likely you will just have to swallow the barium sulfate instead of having to take it as an enema, which is painful), and an endoscopy. These are common tests, but usually have to be performed in a hospital. You will often have to follow a strict diet for a day or so before the test. Be sure to follow it. You really don’t want to have to take these tests a second time. The Surgery Perhaps all of your tests come back indicating that you can, indeed, be helped by surgery. The name of your surgery is called fundoplication, although you probably won’t be having any fun during the surgery, as you’ll be completely knocked out. What the surgeon will do is take the top part of your stomach (called the fundus), wrap it around the bottom of your esophagus and also make sure your stomach and firmly set below your diaphragm. How does this help? This surgery hopes to make your stomach smaller to reduce the acid made. It’s the acid that is making your condition. This surgery hopes also to assist the stomach in keeping what goes into it to stay into it, instead of go back up the esophagus. Effectiveness Many patients are significantly helped by surgery and think that it was worth it. The Mayo Clinic reports that about ninety percent of those having the surgery can go home the next day. Follow up studies of those who had sugery, ninety-six percent say they are still cured one year later.