When you walk down any pharmacy aisle in the stomach/digestive section, you realize that Americans are no strangers to acid reflux. And the numbers back this up — 60 million Americans experience acid reflux at least once a month, and 15 million Americans deal with heartburn on a daily basis.
If you tend to be a daily sufferer of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and conventional treatments are falling short in providing you with relief, it may be time to consider a surgical solution.
The surgeons at Rockwall Surgical Specialists have in-depth experience helping patients resolve their GERD, once and for all, through reflux surgery. Here, we review when surgery might make good sense for treating your acid reflux and what we accomplish during this procedure.
To help you understand why reflux surgery is so successful at resolving moderate to severe GERD, we can review what your body is up against.
When you chew and swallow food, it travels down your esophagus and into your stomach via your lower esophageal sphincter (LES), which closes up as food passes through. This sphincter creates a tight seal that prevents stomach acids from traveling back up into your throat, where they can damage the soft and sensitive tissues that line your esophagus.
When you develop acid reflux, this sphincter is weak and doesn’t close properly, allowing stomach acids, as well as foods, to flow upward. When this occurs, you experience the discomfort of heartburn.
Another road to GERD is hiatal hernia, a condition in which part of your stomach pushes up through your diaphragm, allowing stomach acids to get into your throat.
We referenced pharmacy aisles lined with heartburn medications, and these are the frontline treatments for GERD. These medications, along with avoiding certain foods, are usually enough to help most people with ongoing heartburn — but not everyone.
When patients come to us for reflux surgery, it’s usually because:
If any of these apply to you, reflux surgery might be your best path forward.
There are a couple of key things that we can accomplish during a reflux surgery based upon your circumstances.
For example, if your GERD is a sphincter-only problem, we go in and perform a Nissen fundoplication. During this procedure, we tighten the junction between your throat and your stomach to keep your stomach acids where they belong.
If you have a hiatal hernia that’s contributing to your acid reflux, we can repair the breach to keep your stomach on the underside of your diaphragm.
In some cases, we need to perform both of these procedures if there are dual issues with the hernia and with the LES.
Whenever possible, we use minimally invasive laparoscopic techniques to perform your reflux surgery, which can get you on the road to recovery much faster.
As for how successful reflux surgery is, research has found that 90% of patients achieve relief for five years post-surgery.
If you’d like to explore whether reflux surgery is a good solution for your GERD, please contact us at the Rockwall Surgical Specialists location convenient to you — in Rockwall, Rowlett, Greenville, Terrell, or Forney, Texas — to schedule an appointment.
