Millions of people in the United States suffer from heartburn every year and for most it is just an annoyance that occurs only a few times per year. For an unlucky few, however, heartburn can be so bad that the experience is frightening and the pain can become dangerous. Getting pain relief for bad heartburn pain is essential especially if you can’t get to sleep at night or if you constantly fear eating because you know what is to come afterwards.

Bad heartburn pain is sometimes suffered in silence because it occurs so frequently in the general population that people who have severe cases don’t know they should be seeking medical attention or refuse to seek medical attention to get pain relief solutions to bad heartburn. Treating extreme discomfort and pain caused by bad heartburn can use some experimentation because everybody responds differently to medications or different diets, but even if it means taking medication every day you have to weigh the bad with the good when it comes to the quality of your daily life.

Bad Heartburn Pain Relief With More Serious Measures

For the majority of people with very bad heartburn cases, simple antacids alone cannot relieve the pain. Doctors must instead prescribe drugs such as acid inhibitors, which stop the creation of acid and lower stomach pH. These drugs have come with their own long lists of side effects and they also cannot be taken while on some other medications, so they cannot solve everyone’s problems.

Heartburn can get bad for a number of reasons and finding bad heartburn pain relief can even call for surgery in more serious cases. Corrective surgery can sometimes be the only way to stop excess stomach acid from refluxing back up into the esophagus and causing pain and burning sensations. Extreme cases of heartburn often need a more permanent solution and these types of surgeries can eradicate the need for daily medication.

Natural Pain Relief against Bad Heartburn

Very severe cases of heartburn often require going through every method of medication and pain relief available and sometimes end up with surgery but for those who do not wish to go down this road and would be prefer a more natural route, there are also options. Natural pain relief against bad heartburn should start with a change of lifestyle and a number of days that consists of a healing process.

People who suffer from chronic cases of bad heartburn pain more often than not have a damaged esophagus lining from the amount of acid that is constantly refluxing up from the stomach, and it needs to be healed. If you are looking for bad heartburn pain relief while the esophagus is still damaged you should consider eating only mushy, alkaline foods and avoiding eating anything sharp, spicy or with strong flavor.

Afterwards, care should be taken of the foods eaten and raw or lightly cooked vegetables and fruits should be eaten as much as possible. Food should be chewed properly and eating should stop when a person feels comfortably full and not when they feel bloated or too full. If bad heartburn occurs, natural pain relief methods can include baking soda, chewing gum, club soda, vinegar, milk and a whole host of other consumables.

Vitamin E is a fat soluble vitamin and is an excellent antioxidant that acts against the damage caused by free radicals in the human body. Free radicals are a by product of your natural metabolism that can cause accumulating cellular damage. Vitamin E can help for heartburn by protecting the cell membranes of the GI tract as well as fat-soluble molecules such as LDLs (low density lipoprotein) from becoming damaged due to free radicals.

New Light

However, there have been studies conducted that have shed new light over the benefits of Vitamin E for heartburn, which seem to confirm earlier suggestions that Vitamin E really is not all that is claimed it is. These studies have in fact shown that Vitamin E for heartburn does not significantly help in relieving symptoms of heartburn, and on the contrary. there is some potential for it doing harm to the patient.

The majority opinion however seems to favor Vitamin E for heartburn as it helps improve the circulation of the blood and a small dosage could actually help the patient. If the patient also fails to take adequate amounts of vegetables, nuts as also vegetable oils he or she may be at risk of having deficiency in Vitamin E. Being a potent antioxidant, Vitamin E protects the membranes from becoming damaged by peroxides that are formed when fats are oxidized. Such peroxides are known as free radicals due to the fact that they bounce around in a random and unpredictable manner inside the cells while also altering and even destroying them. Vitamin E for heartburn thus plays an important role in limiting oxidation of fats and thus helps protect the cells from free radicals and in the end provides relief from heartburn.

There are even many studies that support the fact that Vitamin E performs sufficiently well to reduce the damage caused by peroxides, even in spite of the fact that other studies find no significant benefit. Thus, one can safely conclude that there is need for more evidence on the effects of Vitamin E for heartburn, though in theory this reduction in damage caused by peroxides should improve a patient’s heartburn condition. It is thus advisable to take Vitamin E for heartburn even in the form of supplements, and taking one milligram of alpha-tocopherol would be the same as taking one and a half international units of Vitamin E that could be used to combat heartburn.