Somebody said...
I have pain various times during the day but quick and not really pain, just discomfort. I am HOPING that I am having the acid rebound people talk about after getting off a PPI
Ok, I am at the end of this one right now, so here is what I have found, maybe it will help you. I was taking Prevacid and Aciphex for about
3 weeks, and had side-effects, so I went off them. I experienced worse heartburn than I had EVER had before almost immediately, along with a "slow burn" feeling in my stomach that was always present. I took liquid antacids and Zantac, but they barely controlled it at all. I was panicked because the PPIs seemed to have made the GERD go ballistic. However, the good news it that after about
4-5 days, I cut the Zantac down to 1/2 pill per day (not much at all) and things were not perfect, but I wasn't in constant pain. The next few days the "slow burn" continued on and off, and right now I'm off all pills, but still using Tums and Mylanta once or twice a day to calm things. Thus, it IS recovering slowly, but I'm scared of how much the PPIs threw my system off.
The reason I bailed on the PPIs is (1) they were making me sick and nonfunctional and (2) I did some reading on gastrin and cancers, and gastrin is associated with higher cancer risk in many many studies (while the PPI studies seem to claim that gastrin does nothing harmful, which I find doubtful). PPIs throw gastrin through the roof, and leave it there while you're on them.
I almost feel like I need to be my own doctor now, since the PPI game looks to me like a sure way to end up ill for life, as long as it lasts. I'm not a medical expert of any kind, but elevated gastrin levels combined with ghrelin hormones raised causing muscle loss and fat gain is basically a path to ruin. I need to LOSE weight, not gain it.
Anyway, best of luck, I think you can get off the PPIs, but it takes a fairly long time for your stomach to do any kind of calm-down or reset. I'm not sure where to go from here, aside from to start monitoring my gastrin levels. We seem to be living in the Dark Ages when it comes to gastro-intestinal medicine. I have no idea why that is the case, but it is more and more clear that doctors will prescribe PPIs until the cows come home because they don't know what else to do.