Mediterranean Diet Fixes Reflux

Ah well, I guess we'd all want to be able to eat like college students with too much pocket money all our lives, but that's more excessive than most people can tolerate, so those who do it generally get sick. The vast majority of humans who've ever lived have lived on what they could either raise or forage themselves, or could trade for with someone within walking distance.

A lenient elimination diet is fine for people whose reflux isn't serious or frequent enough to require medication. It will probably work, because most reflux is driven by dietary triggers. If it doesn't work, it's time to seek and follow the advice of a Real Doctor^TM rather than that of random blogs and articles online, and rather than popping OTC antacids all the time. The kind of reflux that isn't driven by dietary triggers generally requires surgery to correct, and sooner is better than later

Of course, most people with reflux don't require gastric surgery, and they also don't require an elimination diet to tell which foods don't play well with their digestion, because they already know, the same as smokers know why they're coughing, and people with hangovers know how they got them. The solution, as with so many problems, is "Walk away from what's bad for you". If it's making you sick, why do you keep doing it? Walking away only seems hard while you're denying and bargaining and procrastinating and making excuses; once you quit doing that, it's so easy you'll wonder afterward why you ever thought it was so hard.

People are fantastic at changing their lives when they really want to. The trick is getting them to decide that they do want to, and to ignore all the negative propaganda about how hard and how painful it'll be.

Anyone whose problems are caused or exacerbated by poor choices re diet, sleep, exercise, or other lifestyle factors can fix or ameliorate those problems themselves by making different choices. A lot of people foolishly choose to distrust their doctors rather than making the lifestyle changes their doctors are telling them to make, with predictable results. Bottom line: any problem you can fix yourself is a problem you didn't really need a doctor for.

When you start having real problems, i.e. problems that cannot be solved by changing your lifestyle, you will need a real doctor. Such problems include, but are certainly not limited to, cancer, cardiovascular disease, lupus, MS, ME, Parkinson's disease, liver disease, kidney failure... the list is a long and varied one. Unless you die young in an accident, you will eventually have one or more of those problems, and when you do, it'll be prescription drugs and/or surgery that keep you alive.

It's less than eight months since I watched my dear friend die at the age of 68, and the DIRECT cause of her death was her refusal to trust "allopathic medicine". She would not make the lifestyle changes. She would not go to the doctor until she was literally afraid she would die, and by then it was too late to save her. If she'd gone six months earlier, instead of relying on a quack naturopath, she might be alive right now. Therefore, I don't have a lot of patience left for the "I don't trust doctors" thing: that line of thinking kills people.