I have a medical condition which will be tough to treat, and it means the end of radio (for now)

[Dan Druff]

Yeah, he's probably talking about a hiatal hernia.

While this is possible, it's not likely. That is more associated with GERD and traditional heartburn than LPR.

DonaldTrumpsHairPiece, can you tell me more about your brother's specific symptoms, and what they did to diagnose it?

The other problem is that a lot of people have a hiatal hernia, and are asymptomatic. So even if they were to find a small hiatal hernia in me, that doesn't mean that fixing it surgically would help me here. A large hiatal hernia would likely be related to the problem, though.

In general, unless something is obvious, I want to avoid surgery because of all the potential complications. There are many LPR horror stories where someone goes under the knife for a magical, all-curing surgery, only to find that it worsened their problems or brought on new ones. This is partially due to the wide variance of reasons people get LPR. If you treat the wrong suspected cause, you might actually make things worse. That's part of the huge frustration with this condition -- you're often damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This is different than many other medical issues where a likely problem is found, you go under the knife, and it's corrected. If you get surgery related to your LPR, you had better be damn sure that the cause has properly been identified.

My approach right now is both to add the variables together and to try low-risk solutions, where even if I'm wrong, it won't hurt anything.

Even the Prilosec/Nexium medication course isn't without risk. For LPR, it's said that you need a minimum of three months of a double dose of the stuff, as opposed to the usual 14-day single-dose course needed for GERD. That's a big problem, because such medication has been shown to have a high failure rate for LPR, and people have reported bad rebound effects coming off such medication, such as the appearance of never-before-seen GERD symptoms.

The cold I have right now is interesting, because it's mostly removed the "choking when lying down" sensation I had, and the lump in throat thing is less bothersome. At the same time, the cold has worsened the throat-clearing and vocal symptoms. Overall, the LPR is LESS bothersome with this cold since it showed up. It is unclear what this means, but it's got to be some clue. I am guessing the LPR symptoms will return to how they were before once this cold goes away. This cold, by the way, is of less-than-average severity. Some of my colds are terrible, but this one isn't.

You've had an endoscopy, correct?

I haven't.

Not up to that yet.

Believe it or not, endoscopies also come with some complications, especially involving LPR, where again, sometimes they cause symptoms to worsen or for GERD to suddenly show up with it.

I'm not ruling out having one done, but I'm not jumping to do it at the moment.

Endoscopies are also not nearly as effective at identifying LPR problems as they are for GERD (which it sounds like you had).

If an endoscopy would give me a high chance of identifying the problem here, I would throw caution to the wind and get one done right away.

From what I've read in reports by longtime LPR sufferers, endoscopies have rarely helped them identify or solve their problem.

I have probably done 100+ hours of reading about LPR at this point, which has been a mixture of personal reports from others with the conditions, medical websites, medical journals, National Institute of Health studies, etc.

The one thing I've come away believing: This is incredibly tough to treat, mostly due to the inability to properly identify the cause, which varies in every individual. You have to be very careful before you engage in anything risky to treat it, or you can make things worse, or bring on other problems.