This is a YouTube video titled "Does Heartburn Mean You Have Too Much Stomach Acid?" containing a conversation recorded on November 25, 2020. The discussion involves multiple speakers including Ask AI Mark and another speaker (SPEAKER A) talking about heartburn, its causes, and the effects of proton pump inhibitors, highlighting concerns about medication dependency and withdrawal effects.
And heartburn is this usually a benign condition and it's oftentimes lifestyle related. And you can treat it periodically with as needed baking soda or Alka-Seltzer or Tums if it's mild. But if you're having heartburn all the time, the first thing you need to do is say, well, what's driving this? And again, it's not necessarily stomach acid. In fact, there are a fair number of people who actually have their heartburn because of lack of stomach acid. Yes. and you can actually do some testing for lack of stomach acid. If it's significant, you can actually do testing for gastrin levels. So, and I actually oftentimes will do this on my patients who are on the proton pump inhibitors. So gastrin is produced by the body to tell the body to produce more acid. So if you're taking these heartburn medications for a long period of time, and if you're escalating, you start on a low dose and you go to a moderate dose and you go to a high dose, you're really dropping your stomach acids. Your body says, hey, guess what? We need to make more stomach acids. so it produces a lot more gastrin. And then what happens is because you have so much gastrin, you go off of the medication, your body now starts pumping out lots of acid. And then guess what?
You're gonna get withdrawals. Oh my gosh, Todd, this is the biggest scam ever because- Exactly. Basically, they create a drug that makes you addicted to it. You treat a condition which is pretty benign. When you try to stop the drug, it come back with a vengeance.
Yes.
And so you get hooked on the drugs. Well, I have to take it because as soon as I stop it, I get worse.
