If the list of foods that feel safe keeps getting shorter, if coffee and tomatoes went first, and if it still hurts anyway — the food was never the problem.

Read This If Your List of Safe Foods Keeps Getting Shorter

Boiled potatoes. Plain rice. Clear soup. I did the strict diet for 45 days, then another 30, and I was still struggling. I want to tell you what was happening, because for four years nobody told me.

Boiled potatoes and clear broth. Four years of being careful looks like this.

“The culprit is not the acid. It is the pepsin.”

Dr. Jamie Koufman, ENT surgeon, who studied 899 reflux patients

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By Joan Whitfield · Health & Wellbeing Contributor
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The account below is written from the experiences of people who live with reflux, including verified customer reviews. Names and identifying details have been changed. Every study named in it is listed in full at the end of this page, with its authors and its journal.

Works on the throat rather than on the food list
Not an elimination diet and not an acid blocker
One 2 ml serving after the evening meal
90 nights to decide, money back if it is not right

It began with a sticky note. I want to start with the sticky note on my fridge, because that is how you know.

The meal that was fine last month and is not fine now…

The coffee that went first, then the tomatoes, then the wine…

The list of safe foods that is down to about six things…

The dinner out that gets turned down because it is easier…

A white mug of black coffee, a glass of red wine and a ripe tomato standing together on a kitchen worktop — Coffee, wine, tomato. Usually the first three to go.

Cutting food is what everybody does, and it is why this goes unnamed for years.

None of it needs panicking about. But there is a name for the stage in between, and almost nobody gets told it.

A few things are worth a doctor rather than an article. If food sticks going down, if swallowing hurts, if you are losing weight without trying, if you ever bring up blood, or if you wake unable to pull air in, get that looked at. Those are not the stage this is about.

It is the throat stage. The stomach sends something up after eating and during sleep, it goes past the chest, and it lands in the throat. The throat is already sore before the food arrives, which is why the food gets the blame and why cutting it never fixes anything.

I know what it is like to look at a menu and count how many things on it are safe.

I know giving up coffee, then tomatoes, then onions, then wine, one at a time, over two years.

“I know the meal that was fine last month and is not fine now”

I know saying no to dinner out because it is simply easier than explaining.

I know being told to keep a food diary, and keeping one, and finding no pattern in it at all.

You will notice I keep saying I know. That is not from reading about it. It is from four years of it.

And the fact that you are still reading tells me the cutting has not fixed it for you either.

So here is what the next few minutes are for. First, why the list keeps getting shorter no matter what comes off it. Then the reason the food was never the thing doing the damage.

There is no food on that list that caused this.

The little yellow square stuck to my fridge door has eight foods written on it.

Those are the ones I am allowed.

Potatoes with nothing on them. White rice. Broth with nothing floating in it.

Dry toast, and only the white kind. Chicken with nothing on it.

Banana. Oatmeal made with water.

And one more that went back on the list last month, which I will come to at the end.

Nobody hands you a note like that. You write it yourself, one bad night at a time.

A handwritten list on a fridge door with most of the entries struck through in different inks — Written by hand, and crossed off the same way.

How a Food List Gets Shorter

It works the same way every time. You eat something ordinary.

A tomato. A slice of orange. Half a glass of wine at somebody's wedding.

That night your throat starts burning, and it is still burning two days later, so you cross that food off, and you are not being dramatic when you do it.

Four things crossed out - acid pills, cutting foods out, more pillows, throat sprays — Every one of these is aimed at the chest. The problem is higher up.

You are being sensible, because you have already paid for that mistake twice and you would like to not pay for it again.

Then it happens with something else, and you cross that off too.

Four years of sensible decisions is how a full page becomes eight foods on a sticky note.

A plain white mug of coffee steaming on a kitchen worktop at first light with the window above the sink behind it — The mug that stopped being part of the morning.

I miss coffee in the mornings.

I miss coffee with my friends.

I miss eating at my favorite restaurants.

“I miss having a beer after a hard day”

I am not saying that for sympathy. I am saying it because you have your own version of that list, and nobody has ever asked you about it.

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The Forty Five Days, and Then Another Thirty

I followed that plain eating plan exactly the way it was written, and I want to be clear about that, because people assume you cheated.

45 days. Weighed, planned, written down, no slips.

A paper year planner pinned to a kitchen wall, ruled into twelve blocks of empty squares with an identical pencil tick in every one — A plan on the wall, and every square looking like the last.

Then another thirty, because I read that it takes longer for some people.

Seventy five days of eating like somebody in a hospital bed.

I was still struggling.

That is the sentence I would go back and underline if I could.

Because I had done everything I was told, and it had not worked. There was only one explanation I could think of at the time.

I decided the problem was me.

That I had a weak stomach, or a nervous one, or that this was simply what getting older was going to be.

My daughter asked me once why I did not try harder with the diet.

She was not being unkind. She had watched me eat plain rice for two months and get no better, and the only thing left to blame was me.

The Dinner I Ate Before I Went To My Own Sixtieth

My son booked a table for my sixtieth. A nice place, the sort you go to twice in your life.

I had my own dinner at home first, so I would not have to order anything.

“A bowl of oatmeal at home, standing up, twenty minutes before the taxi came”

I did that so I would not have to look at the menu and do the sums. Which one thing on it would not cost me the next two days.

So I sat at my own birthday dinner with a glass of water and a bread roll I did not touch.

One restaurant place setting left untouched with a plain glass of water, a whole bread roll and a clean unused knife, while every other place at the table holds a finished plate and a used napkin — One place at the table stayed exactly as it was laid.

Everybody was lovely about it.

That was somehow the worst part, because nobody made a thing of it, which told me it had stopped being unusual.

I went home that night and I did not cry about the food.

I cried because I worked out that I had not eaten a meal I chose in nearly four years.

That is when I stopped calling it a diet. My life had got smaller, and I had helped it happen one reasonable decision at a time.

I am telling you the end early, because I would have wanted somebody to tell me.

It had a cause, the cause had a name, and the name was not the one I had been given for four years.

Five blank appointment cards and two folded letters fanned out across a hall table beside a set of keys — Appointments and letters, and not one of them named this.

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What I Found When I Finally Looked It Up Properly

There is a surgeon in New York called Dr. Jamie Koufman, and she is an ear, nose and throat surgeon.

That means the part of the body she operates on is the exact part that hurts when I eat.

She has spent her career on this one condition, and she studied 899 people with reflux to work out what does the damage.

It is not the acid.

It is pepsin.

“The culprit is not the acid. It is the pepsin.”
Dr. Jamie Koufman, ear, nose and throat surgeon

I had never heard that word before, so here is what it means in plain English.

An enzyme is a protein that takes other proteins apart. Pepsin is the one your stomach makes to break down the meat, the eggs and the fish you eat.

Its job is taking protein apart.

It cannot tell the difference between your dinner and you.

Now here is the part that matters.

Your stomach has a thick lining built to sit in that stuff all day long.

Your throat has nothing like it.

Your stomach rebuilds that green layer every day. Your throat has no way to make one.

Here is the way the surgeon explained it to me, and it is the only way it ever made sense.

Acid is the match. Pepsin is the gasoline, and it is already soaked into your throat.

A match on its own burns out. Gasoline that is already soaked in does not.

One goes out on its own. The other has fuel already in it.

That is what pepsin does.

It is also why the pills helped a little and never finished the job. They took away some of the matches. The gasoline was still sitting there.

The tissue in your throat is thin and bare, like the inside of your cheek.

So when stomach contents travel up past the valve at the top of your stomach, pepsin travels up with them. It lands on tissue that was never built to survive it.

Then it stays there.

It does not wash away when you swallow, and it does not go home at the end of the day.

“This is why the whole thing never looked like reflux to anybody, including me”

Only about one in five people with this condition ever get heartburn. That is from Dr. Koufman’s own study of 899 patients.

No burning in the chest. Nothing pointing at the stomach at all.

Just a throat that is raw, a voice that goes by the afternoon, and a list of foods that keeps getting shorter.

Doctors have a name for it. Silent reflux. It is called silent because the loudest sign, the one everybody knows to look for, is the one most of us never get.

Why the Food Kept Hurting Even After I Cut It Out

This is the piece that finally explained my seventy five days, and Dr. Koufman is the one who teaches it.

Pepsin does not simply pass through your throat.

It can settle into the tissue and sit there quietly, doing nothing, for hours, then something acidic comes past.

Three panels linked by arrows showing pepsin landing on throat tissue, waiting asleep, then waking when acidic food arrives — This is why a meal on Monday can still burn on Wednesday.

A tomato. A glass of orange juice. A cup of coffee.

And the pepsin that was already sitting in your throat wakes back up and starts working again.

A ripe tomato, a small glass of orange juice and a mug of black coffee standing in a row on a worn kitchen worktop — Plain breakfast things. Any of these can set it off again.

Read that once more, because it changes what the diet is.

The food is not the enemy.

The food is the trigger for damage that was already parked in your throat.

That is why one wrong meal costs you two days instead of two hours, and it is why cutting more food out feels like it should work and never quite does.

Think of a burn on the back of your hand, and being careful about what you touch.

Being careful will stop the burn getting worse.

It will not close the burn, because nothing closes a burn except giving the skin cover and time.

Cover is the one thing being careful never gives it.

I had spent four years being careful about what I touched, and I had never once given the burn any cover.

Everything I Tried, and the Gap in Each One

I want to go through these honestly, because you have probably tried the same list.

A thick pile of curled pharmacy receipts heaped on a kitchen table — Every one of these was bought hoping it would be the last one.

The strict diet. It lowers what travels up, and that part is genuinely useful. It does nothing at all about the damage already sitting there. That is why you can be perfect for seventy five days and still be sore.

Water, mints and honey. They wash the throat. Washing is not covering, and anything that thin is gone in a minute.

A half drunk glass of tap water standing on the edge of a bathroom sink in thin early morning light — Water shifts it, and then it is gone again.

Not eating after six. Sensible, and it helps the nights. It also shrinks your life a little more, and my mornings were still bad.

Standing up it stays put. Flat is when it goes travelling.

The acid pills. This is the one that made me angry when I understood it.

Acid blockers lower acid. They do not switch off pepsin. Three researchers in England went back over the evidence on this in 2012, and they put the answer in the title of their own paper. Pepsin is what is wearing the throat away.

The pill does exactly what it says on the box, and the enzyme carries on working.

Four blank foil blister cards of small white tablets on a scratched kitchen table, half the bubbles punched out — Taken exactly as printed, and aimed somewhere else entirely.

So you can have your acid down at the level your doctor wants and still have a throat that cannot handle a slice of tomato.

Every single thing on that list was aimed at what comes up, and not one of them was aimed at the tissue it lands on.

An open kitchen drawer crowded with the real medicine packs most people already keep at home - Prilosec OTC, Nexium 24HR, Pepcid AC, Gaviscon Extra Strength, Flonase Allergy Relief, Mucinex DM, a Tums bottle, Halls cough drops and Ricola throat drops - with loose tablets and crumbs — Not one of these is a bad product. Every one of them is built for a chest or a nose.

Everything That Was Already In The Cupboard

Tums and Rolaids — chewed at midnight, good for about 40 minutes
Omeprazole — taken every morning for eight months
Famotidine — the one taken at night instead
Apple cider vinegar — a spoonful before dinner, because the internet said so
Flonase and allergy tablets — two years of them, for a nose problem that was not there
Dropping the coffee, and after that the tomatoes, the onions and the wine — each one on its own, across two years
The wedge pillow — used for a month, still in the loft

Some of those genuinely helped, and that is the part worth being honest about. They helped for an hour. An hour is not a night, and a night is what the throat needed.

A side cutaway showing stomach contents travelling up past the chest and settling on the thin lining of the throat and voice box — Past the chest, where the burning would have warned you, and onto the one piece of tissue with no nerve endings for it.

Here is the part that took four years to arrive, and it is the only part that ever mattered.

The lining of the throat was never failing to heal. It was healing, a little, every single day. And then it was being hit again the same night.

That is why everything helped for an hour and nothing held for a month. Not one of those products was wrong. All of them were built to go after the burning, and the burning is not what wears the throat away.

Being told that made me angry first and hopeful second. Angry because it is not complicated and nobody said it. Hopeful because it means nothing that failed, failed because of the person taking it.

Where This Usually Starts, And Where It Usually Goes

A general picture of how throat reflux tends to move when nothing about the nights changes. Individual experience varies.

Year one

Clearing the throat. Put down to a cold that hung around.

Years two to three

Mucus every morning. A voice worn thin before the day is over.

Years four to five

A lump that will not swallow away. A second pillow.

Year six onward

Sleeping propped upright. The food list down to a handful.

Every night it gets hit, so it never finishes healing. The layer is the night off.

What Keeps Failing

Cutting out one food at a time for months
Elimination diets that never find the food
Eating earlier and still waking up with it

What the Throat Actually Needs

Lays a coat over the raw lining
Calms the swelling underneath it
Feeds the lining while it rebuilds
One 2 ml serving after the evening meal

What Each One Is Built To Reach

Acid pills, a shorter food list, and a nightly coating compared on the job each one does

	Acid Pills	Cutting Food Out	EsoRepair
Lowers the acid itself	Yes	Some	No
Works fastest on a burning chest	Yes	No	No
Reaches the throat lining itself	No	No	Yes
Puts a layer between pepsin and the throat	No	No	Yes
Helps calm tissue that is already sore	No	No	Yes
Gives the lining what it needs to rebuild	No	No	Yes
Costs you another food every few months	No	Yes	No

Acid pills means the ones people keep in the cupboard. Omeprazole, famotidine, Tums and Rolaids. This table shows the job each product is aimed at, not whether any of them works.

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Where it lands, and why nothing aimed at the chest ever reached it.

What Finally Put Food Back on the Table

Animation of the three layers coating, calming and healing the throat lining — Coat it. Calm it. Heal it. Seven ingredients doing three jobs.

You cannot scrub gasoline out of cloth it has soaked into.

What you can do is lay something over it so nothing can reach it, cool what already burned, and give it the time it needs to rebuild.

That is all those three words mean.

Aloe vera

Licorice root

Turmeric

Grape seed

Vitamins C, E and B6

Once I understood that an enzyme was sitting on bare tissue, three things had to happen at the same time.

Cover the raw tissue, so that what comes up lands on a layer instead of on the burn.

Calm what is already sore, because swollen tissue cannot rebuild itself.

Two slices of tissue side by side, one puffed up and angry red, the other settled flat and calm pink — Tissue that is still angry cannot get on with rebuilding.

Heal the lining, because tissue repairs out of what you give it, and nothing repairs on an empty tank.

I use a daily liquid called EsoRepair.

The EsoRepair bottle standing on a kitchen counter — Sixty millilitres. Thirty servings. It lives next to the kettle.

It is a liquid instead of a tablet, and that is not a small detail.

A tablet is built to get past your throat quickly and open up in your stomach.

Your throat is the part that is hurt, and a tablet goes straight past it, while a liquid coats it on the way down.

One never touches the sore part. The other lands on it.

There are seven things in it, and each one is doing one of those three jobs.

Aloe vera leaf extract and licorice root extract are the covering.

Both go slippery in liquid and cling to whatever they touch. That is the whole reason this comes in a bottle and not a blister pack.

Thin runs off. Thicker holds on to what it touches.

Turmeric root extract and grape seed extract are the calming part.

Both are plant antioxidants, which is a word for something that settles down the chemical wear and tear going on in sore tissue.

Vitamin C, vitamin E and vitamin B6 are the rebuilding part.

Your body already uses all three every day to keep ordinary tissue healthy. Vitamin C is the one it uses to build the springy fibres that hold soft tissue together.

Underneath, it is a weave. That is the part getting put back.

The aloe is the piece with a proper trial behind it, so I want to show you that trial and then show you its limits.

In 2015 a team led by Yunes Panahi published one in the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Seventy nine people with reflux, four weeks, aloe vera syrup tested straight against omeprazole and ranitidine, which are two of the standard acid drugs.

The aloe brought down all eight of the main symptoms they were measuring.

Now the limits, and I am not going to skate over them.

That trial was on the heartburn kind of reflux, not the throat kind I have.

It also used more aloe in a day than one serving of this gives you, so it tells you the plant does something. It is not a study of this bottle.

One more thing, and it matters if you take tablets for anything.

This uses whole licorice root, not the stripped-down kind, and whole licorice can push blood pressure up in some people.

Dried licorice root on a board, whole dark fibrous pieces on one side and pale stripped pieces on the other — Two different things sold under one name.

If you take anything for blood pressure or for your heart, check with your doctor before you start.

The slow swallow is the whole point. That is what puts the layer where it is needed.

That is the entire thing you have to remember. Two millilitres is a little under half a teaspoon, so it is over in a second.

A stainless steel teaspoon on a small white saucer with a shallow pool of thick dark amber liquid in the bowl — The whole serving, next to a spoon for scale.

I take mine after dinner, because dinner is the meal that used to cost me the most.

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Questions People Ask Before They Try It

Do I have to stay on the diet?

I did not.

I did not give up coffee and I did not stop eating late.

The only thing I added to my day was one small serving in the evening.

Will I be able to eat tomatoes and coffee again?

I can, and I am not going to promise you the same on a timeline.

What changed for me was that food stopped being the thing that decided how my evening went.

Why did cutting food out not fix it?

Because the food was never the whole problem.

Cutting out coffee and tomatoes gives your stomach less to send up.

It does nothing about the pepsin already sitting on your throat, which is why the list kept getting shorter and you kept feeling the same.

Can I take it with my other medicine?

You do not stop anything to try it.

This is a food supplement, not a drug, and it is not an acid blocker, so it is not doing the same job as anything you were prescribed.

If you take prescription medicine, run it past your doctor first.

How fast does it work?

Not in three days.

See the timeline below.

Anyone telling you that you will be eating anything you like next week is not being straight with you.

Is there anyone who should not take it?

The licorice in the bottle is the entire root, and not the version that has had part of it taken out.

Whole licorice can push blood pressure up in some people.

If you take anything for blood pressure or your heart, check with your doctor before you start.

How Long It Actually Took

Three panels showing the throat lining at day 1 red and rough, day 7 pink and smoother, and day 30 calm and smooth, with large arrows carrying the eye from each panel to the next — Tissue rebuilds slowly. This is roughly what the first month looked like for me.

I am going to be honest about this, because I nearly stopped.

Nothing happened in the first few days. If you want something that fixes tonight, this is not it, and anybody promising you that is selling you something.

Week one, the mornings were the first thing I noticed. Less scraping when I woke up.

An ordinary kitchen sink before dawn with the overhead light on, the window above it completely dark, one glass upturned on the drainer and a tea towel over the worktop edge — The kitchen before anybody else is up.

Around week three, I ate a piece of chicken with garlic in it by accident and nothing happened.

I sat there waiting for it, the way you wait for a bill.

It did not come.

That was the day I let myself believe it.

Week six to eight, I started putting things back on the note instead of taking them off.

One at a time, a few days apart, so I would know which one caused trouble if trouble came.

Tomato went back on. That took two tries.

Coffee went back on. One cup, in the morning, with food, and that is the one I added last month.

I am not going to tell you I eat anything I like now. I do not, and I would not trust a page that told you it works that way.

What I will tell you is that the note is getting longer instead of shorter. I had four years of it only going one way.

This is also why it is a daily thing and not a when-it-is-bad thing. The lining can only rebuild if the conditions hold day after day.

If You Are the One Doing the Cooking

I want to say something to the person who is not the one with the sore throat.

If you have been cooking two dinners every night, one for the family and one plain one, that is years of work. Nobody has ever counted it.

A wooden dining table part way through a family meal with four places set, a serving dish in the middle and one chair pushed back — The dinner that gets cooked for everybody else.

You are also usually the one who ends up looking for an answer. That is because the person living in it has been told it is nothing so many times that they have stopped asking.

I wrote it down, because I did not trust my own memory about whether anything was changing.

Week one. Meals that had to be cut short or skipped — 9 in the first week.

Week three. 4.

Week seven. 1, and that one was my own fault.

Those are numbers out of a notebook, not out of a study, and they are mine rather than anybody else’s. But they are the whole reason I kept going past the first month, when honestly I could not tell.

A used envelope turned over on a kitchen table, covered in a handwritten list in blue biro with one line crossed out — The tally I kept on the back of an envelope.

The thing that finally convinced me was not my own list.

It was my husband saying, about nine weeks in, that I had ordered something at dinner I had not ordered in two years.

He was not being kind about it. He genuinely had not noticed it stopping, which is exactly the point. The people who live with this notice the things we stop doing long before we notice them ourselves.

A bedside table in bright morning daylight with the EsoRepair bottle, a teaspoon on a saucer, a glass of water and reading glasses, beside a made bed with a single flat pillow — One flat pillow, and a morning that starts without clearing anything.

What Other People Found

A Short Safe List, Then Pizza

★★★★★

“I had eleven foods on my safe list.

I am up to twenty three, and I stopped counting the day I ate a slice of pizza.”

Diane M., 61 · Ohio

The End Of The Second Dinner

★★★★★

“Two years of cooking myself a separate plain dinner while everyone else ate what I made them.

Last Sunday I ate what I cooked.”

Patricia H., 64 · Arizona

Coffee Again After Four Years

★★★★★

“My morning coffee is back. One cup, with breakfast.

After four years without it, that is not a small thing to me.”

Linda R., 58 · Michigan

* Individual results vary. The weeks described above are one person’s experience and are not a promise of what anyone else will see.

4.9★★★★★7,000+ reviews from 30,000+ customers

5 star91%

4 star6%

3 star2%

2 star1%

1 star0%

Taste4.6

Ease of use4.9

Value4.8

Would buy again4.9

The lowest score on that list is the taste, and that is fair. It is a plant syrup and it tastes like one. It is over in two seconds.

90 Days

Every bottle comes with a 90 day money back guarantee, because 30 days is not long enough to know and I would rather you found out properly.

If the note on your fridge has not got any longer after using it properly, you write to support@docteat.com and your money comes back.

The ladder further up this page is the part that does not wait. It kept moving for years while I looked for the right answer, and it moves whether anyone decides anything or not.

You do not post anything back to us.

If you have been eating around your own throat for years, 90 days is not a big thing to ask.

The same woman propped upright on a stack of three pillows, awake and tense in the middle of the night — Same Bed. Fewer Pillows. The stack comes down one at a time.

The same woman in the same bed with two pillows behind her, settled and starting to sleep — Same Bed. Fewer Pillows. The stack comes down one at a time.

What The Next Three Months Actually Look Like

Week oneNothing obvious. Most people quit here, which is why it is worth naming now.
Weeks two to threeMeals that do not have to be cut short.
Weeks four to sixPutting one thing back on the list, carefully, and it being fine.
Weeks seven to twelveOrdering off a menu without doing the arithmetic first.

* Individual results vary. The weeks described above are one person’s experience and are not a promise of what anyone else will see.

A paper wall calendar with a small pencil tick in every day square, running unbroken across several rows and stopping partway, with empty squares still to come — One tick a night. That is what 90 nights looks like on a kitchen wall.

Will It Actually Do Anything, Or Is This Another Thing That Does Not Work?

That is the right question and it deserves a straight answer.

It does not work in a day. Nothing that has to let a lining rebuild works in a day, and anything sold as working overnight is selling something else.

It is a nightly thing for 90 nights, because the throat only gets to repair if the nights hold. That is why the promise runs to 90 nights instead of 30. A month will not tell you either way, and asking somebody to decide that early is asking them to guess.

Update

Stock is checked on the page itself rather than here, because it moves and this article does not. The link below goes to the current availability and the current price. There is no code to remember and no timer counting down on this page, because a timer that restarts for the next reader is not a deadline at all. The one honest thing the date at the top does tell you is that this page is still up. We take it down when a batch runs out, because sending people to a bottle we cannot ship is worse than sending them nowhere. Every batch so far has gone faster than the one before it.

So one honest warning before you go and look. This is a small operation and the bottles are made in batches. If you click and the page says there are none left, I am sorry. That does happen. It is still worth clicking to see for yourself, because the only way to know what is on the shelf today is to look at the shelf.

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90 nights to decide · money back if it is not right

P.S. If only one line here is familiar, let it be the shrinking list. Cutting food works for a week and then the next thing has to go. A list that keeps getting shorter is not a food problem. It is a throat that was raw and hurting before anything was put in your mouth.

Where The Research Referred To Above Comes From

Panahi Y and colleagues. “Efficacy and safety of Aloe vera syrup for the treatment of gastroesophageal reflux disease. A pilot randomized positive-controlled trial.” Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 2015, volume 35, issue 6, pages 632 to 636. Aloe vera syrup was measured against omeprazole and against ranitidine over four weeks.
Koufman JA. “The otolaryngologic manifestations of gastroesophageal reflux disease.” Laryngoscope, 1991, volume 101, supplement 53, pages 1 to 78. This is the paper that separated throat reflux from ordinary heartburn and gave it its own name.
Raveendra KR and colleagues. “An extract of Glycyrrhiza glabra alleviates symptoms of functional dyspepsia. A randomized, double blind, placebo controlled study.” Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2012, article 216970. Glycyrrhiza glabra is the plant licorice root comes from.
Bardhan KD, Strugala V, Dettmar PW. “Reflux revisited. Advancing the role of pepsin.” International Journal of Otolaryngology, 2012, article 646901. This is the paper that set out why lowering stomach acid does not switch pepsin off.
Campagnolo AM and colleagues. “Laryngopharyngeal reflux. Diagnosis, treatment, and latest research.” International Archives of Otorhinolaryngology, 2013, volume 18, issue 2, pages 184 to 191. This is the review that reports Dr. Koufman’s finding that only about 1 in 5 people with the throat kind ever get heartburn.
Helgadottir H, Bjornsson ES. “Problems associated with deprescribing of proton pump inhibitors.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2019, volume 20, issue 21. This is where the figure on how few acid-blocker prescriptions have a proper reason behind them comes from.
Andrawes M and colleagues. “Proton pump inhibitors. An evidence based review of indications, efficacy, harms, and deprescribing.” Medicina, 2025, volume 61, issue 9. A more recent review that reached the same finding.
Namikawa K, Bjornsson ES. “Rebound acid hypersecretion after withdrawal of long term proton pump inhibitor treatment. Are PPIs addictive?” International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2024, volume 25, issue 10. This is where the 40 to 50 in every 100 healthy people figure comes from.