I strongly recommend that you consider subscribing to the New York Times. The newspaper is outstanding. Here is the link [This is not an affiliate link, I just strongly recommend NYT].
Today, I link to and excerpt from The Mystery of My Burning Esophagus:
As a science writer, I’ve spent years covering the rise of allergic conditions. Why couldn’t I figure out my own?* By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Oct. 4, 2023
*I strongly recommend that all clinicians (physicians, pharmacists, NPs, RNs, and PAs carefully review this outstanding article.
All that follows is from the above resource.
My year of torment began with a brutal headache. The pain came on gradually over several weeks, as if some part of my brain were being slowly squeezed in a vise. Darkness lapped at the edge of my vision. Over-the-counter painkillers didn’t help. Occasionally, a dementia-like loss of vocabulary struck, often when I was talking to people over the phone. I found myself unable to recall easy things like “Washington, D.C.” or “George Clooney.” I’d end up staring at my computer without any inkling of what I’d sat down to do.
Unfortunately, something was starting to disturb my insides. It began as a faint sensation of heat under my sternum and over several weeks grew stronger, until it felt as if some part of me had caught fire. The sensation reached an apogee one night following a meal of greasy quesadillas with hot peppers. After that, I changed my diet, abandoned coffee and avoided heavy foods, all said to aggravate reflux. But whatever was happening to me only got worse. Warmth began to rise in my throat soon after every meal, no matter how light or bland the food. To avoid the feeling of lava bubbling up within me, I ate as little as possible. I started to lose weight.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was embarking on a journey into territory I knew well. My ailment, it would turn out, was of a piece with a much larger development in affluent countries over the past 150 years or so. As improved sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics and other innovations beat back infectious diseases, some chronic diseases have been on the rise, including disorders in which the very immune system meant to protect us turns on us instead. A leading explanation for such self-sabotage involves the changes we have wrought on our microbiomes, the communities of microbes living in and on our bodies. As a science writer, I’d covered this phenomenon extensively. But despite having written a book about some of the diseases involved and the reasons for their increasing prevalence, I hadn’t ever considered how they could lead to the kind of unremitting pain that was making my life so miserable now at 47.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was embarking on a journey into territory I knew well. My ailment, it would turn out, was of a piece with a much larger development in affluent countries over the past 150 years or so. As improved sanitation, vaccines, antibiotics and other innovations beat back infectious diseases, some chronic diseases have been on the rise, including disorders in which the very immune system meant to protect us turns on us instead. A leading explanation for such self-sabotage involves the changes we have wrought on our microbiomes, the communities of microbes living in and on our bodies. As a science writer, I’d covered this phenomenon extensively. But despite having written a book about some of the diseases involved and the reasons for their increasing prevalence, I hadn’t ever considered how they could lead to the kind of unremitting pain that was making my life so miserable now at 47.
You need to go to the article and completely review it.
