Gastritis – Treatment

Transcript

Gastritis, how would you treat well, basic rules of thumb is you always try to get the patient to do something good for themselves. Okay. So we would ask that they avoid substances that naturally they feel triggered is. In particular, we would ask them to avoid alcoholic beverages and they may want to look out for caffeine. Okay. Because these types of agents can actually trigger increased secretion of gastric acid and it’s the gastric acid that irritates the lining of the stomach that produces some of the symptoms. So referencing gastritis, that’s one of the very first things we do. The next thing we would do is prescribe a form of antacid therapy. In the past we used to rely on medications such as liquid antacids, but we’ve developed more potent and more easily acceptable forms of medication for patients. And so there are certain types of antacids that block acid secretion in the stomach. One group called H2 blockers is a fairly useful group, but that would represent things such as Tagamet or Zantac or Pepcid. There is a newer category of medications called Proton pump inhibitors, very fancy term, but basically you can think of Proton pump inhibitors or PPIs as smart bombs. So they hit the main factory where acid is produced in the stomach lining. It knock it out. You’re not going to produce stomach acid if you hit that particular acid factory. And so those are the most potent types of antacid medications that we would recommend for patients who have, let’s say, gastritis, and usually that’ll take care of it.