What are the general principles of daily care for patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease?
(1) Pay attention to regular food.
We often see some young people who get up all night and don't eat breakfast. Some college students get up a few minutes before class, go hungry for the first class, and then rush to breakfast during the recess. Others may be unable to attend to lunch or dinner due to busy schedules.
This is often the case with taxi drivers, software programmers, etc. As everyone knows, an irregular diet will inevitably mess up the normal esophagus and gastrointestinal movements. For such patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease, if the problem of regular diet is not solved, no matter how much medicine is taken, it will not work. Also, be careful not to eat at night before going to bed. Eating a lot of food or other things before going to bed will aggravate bloating, nausea, and even at night when you are asleep, it is easy to regurgitate food into the trachea, causing pneumonia.
(2) Pay attention to the type and amount of food and drink.
For patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease, special attention should be paid to what can be eaten, which cannot be eaten, and which cannot be eaten temporarily. Also pay attention to the question of how much to eat. Some patients have poor appetite, and some are not bad, but after eating, they have epigastric pain and abdominal distention.
Therefore, some foods that are not easy to digest, such as too hard, too raw, too spicy or more fiber-containing foods, including vegetables or fruits, should be restricted when symptoms are obvious. Foods with more fat, especially meat, should pay more attention to restrictions. Because of all foods, fats affect the movement of the esophagus, stomach and duodenum, and slow down gastric contraction and emptying are the most significant.
(3) Pay attention to the quality of the food.
For the same food, different cooking methods also have an important impact on the residual time in the stomach. Food enters the stomach, through the activity of the stomach, repeated grinding, mixed with acids and enzymes in gastric juice, digested into chyme, can be discharged from the pylorus little by little into the duodenum.
Obviously, the traits of food are closely related to the digestion and emptying of food in the stomach. Rice is easier to pass through the esophagus and stomach than rice compared to porridge. If the long-fiber food is cut very finely with a knife, it solves the problem that the stomach is difficult to digest. Even if the meat is very hard when served after cooking, the stomach is difficult to digest, which will inevitably seriously affect the emptying of the stomach. Conversely, when boiled into broth, the problem of difficult stomach emptying will not exist.
(4) Pay attention to the amount and speed of eating.
Some people are impatient, sharp, and eat as fast as the wind. This is really harmful for patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease. Our stomach was quiet, and a large amount of food poured in from the cardia at once, and the stomach cavity immediately accumulated and swelled. At this time, you may experience severe colic in the upper abdomen, vomiting, and may even cause hematemesis.
Therefore, we ask these patients to change this habit, extend the time of eating, reduce the amount of food at a time, and determine the amount and speed of eating with a feeling of no discomfort in the abdomen. Some patients often have this experience, eat less bloating is light. But also be aware that eating less may lead to nutritional deficiencies. How to ensure adequate nutritional intake without overloading our stomach requires us to spend some effort to figure out.
(5) Attention should be paid to appropriate activities and the combination of dynamic and static.
The first is not to lie flat on the sofa immediately after a meal, or to sleep in bed. This is because the gastrointestinal tract after the meal is busy digesting, absorbing and moving, blood flow increases, and the blood supply to the brain is relatively reduced, making people feel sleepy, tired, and drowsy. In fact, at this time, it should be a little active. It is best to take a walk for a few minutes, which is conducive to the emptying of the stomach. The so-called "100 steps after a meal" also lies in this. Of course, even if it is rest, we must also pay attention to the position and posture of sleep. The outlet of the stomach is on the right side, and we should take the right side when lying in bed, which is conducive to the output of the gastric chycodyle to the duodenum.
However, patients with gastroesophageal reflux are best placed in the left recumbent position, because the right recumbent position greatly increases the chance of acidic fluids in the stomach regurgitating into the esophagus. When it comes to events, this is often overlooked. Attention to the combination of motion and static is essential for the treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease and the prevention of recurrence.
Most of the patients we see in the clinic are personal habits of inactivity, or come from difficult jobs such as taxi drivers, software programmers, cashiers, accountants and salesmen. After retirement, I always sit on the sofa and watch TV, and I am also prone to illness.
Note that the condition of gastrointestinal movement is closely related to the person's overall activity. Patients who are bedridden for a long time will often have severe constipation, and this is the reason. At present, the health care measures of employees in various units are relatively standardized, including inter-work breaks and inter-work exercises. In foreign countries, the lack of activities of the work unit advocates that every half hour of work needs to be active for 5 minutes, and there are prescribed activities, most of which are physical exercises.