Omeprazole use

[Sprinst]

I am a long term user of Omeprazole along with a lot of other meds including aspirin. I had diarrhea at first but it did settle down. In the 80s I had serious ulcer issues resulting in major surgery and had Omeprazole been around then that would not of happened. Acid reflux can cause idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis which I also have and this is terminal. If you can get used to the Omeprazole great you won't regret it. If you need an alternative then a conversation with a gastric specialist rather than a cardiac specialist is much better as they tend to understand the situation more.Best of look and keep positive....trev

[Lowerfield_no_more]

I too suffer from reflux disease and have been taking PPIs ever since a particularly bad bout of 'indigestion' nearly 20 years ago despatched me to a gastro consultant. As you rightly indicate long term reflux of highly acidic stomach contents can have major even life threatening outcomes and should be treated seriously. I was told I have Barrett's Oesophagus which is where the oesophagus cells change through long term acid backwash, although that was found to be stable after PPIs were prescribed, and this is often considered to be a precursor to oesophageal cancer, which is a bullet I have hopefully dodged. Nonetheless as I have mentioned in another very recent post I often wonder at the wisdom of prescribing PPIs to merely 'settle the stomach' when taking certain medication, without first establishing that there is an actual need for it. Finally one cause of gastro ulcers is the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori, which wasn't discovered until the 1980s and I was tested for this some years ago having likely had a gastric ulcer, and was found to be positive and the week's course of medication eliminated it, and I have not had any further symptoms. Interestingly I did read somewhere that you are likely infected by your mother and in my case both my maternal grandmother and my mother had gastro ulcers, and in my mother's case she had to have surgery as you did, in days when that was basically the only 'cure'.