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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News continues to amaze. There's always a worrying high ratio of comments in health and diet threads from people making drastic and impulsive decisions without medical advice, usually off the back of incomplete conclusions or anecdote.

Newspaper coverage certainly needs to contain more scrutiny of the quality of scientific papers (and their review), but this paper explicitly concludes that there are other factors at work.

Don't stop taking your meds. If you have reflux issues and you're concerned about this, take the paper to your specialist and get their informed opinion.

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Notably, this isn't the first study to raise an uncertain, correlation risk about PPIs. A specialist, or in many cases even a GP, should be aware of the topic and able to answer questions.

I'm also a bit disturbed to see people framing this as "comfort versus cancer" - seeing as untreated acid reflux can be a cause of esophageal cancer, "I'll just quit without asking a doctor" is far from a sound course of action.

I wish there was more info out there on the risks for reflux -> Barret’s -> cancer. I could barely find anything when I last looked, except that frequent reflux sufferers are advised to get an endoscopy once every few years. (So I guess Barret's develops pretty slowly?) Also, the fact that smoking is correlated with both reflux and cancer significantly confounds the issue.

I think LPR and GERD are kind of unique in that their symptoms are all over the place and long-term solutions are very hard to come by. In many cases the meds only mask the condition instead of fixing it, and doctors often don’t know what to do except recommend lifestyle changes and prescribe more PPIs. All the while endoscopies etc. come back clean and you still feel like crap. It’s a very mentally taxing group of disorders!

Quite a commentary on the lack of confidence in modern medicine isn't it? No none trusts the specialist.

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