JOHN HORN, PharmD: Heartburn can be a sign of a more severe condition that might require a physician's evaluation when a number of symptoms or signs are present. For example, if a patient has painful or difficult swallowing, if they have GI blood loss, whether that's in the stool or perhaps vomiting blood. Sometimes patients develop coughs or upper respiratory symptoms associated with their heartburn. Severe chest pain ought to be evaluated by a physician. So there's a number of kind of warning signs or alarm signs.
ANNOUNCER: But when a person has none of these alarm symptoms, doctors say patients can feel comfortable treating their heartburn themselves.
Simple lifestyle changes are often a good place to start: avoiding acidic foods, cutting alcohol consumption, quitting smoking, losing weight, waiting a few hours after eating before lying down to bed. But when lifestyle changes are not enough, people with heartburn can usually get good relief with readily-available over-the-counter medicines, although a little trial and error may be in order.
JOHN HORN, PharmD: I think a lot of patients get good relief from over-the-counter medicines. They may find that they may have to try different medicines or combinations or different doses or combine them with some lifestyle changes, but, if a patient works at it, they can usually get pretty good relief from a simple episodic heartburn.
EVELYN HERMES DeSANTIS, PharmD: For treating simple heartburn, we have a number of different medications available. The over-the-counter products that have been on the market for some time include the antacids and the histamine blockers, the H2RAs, as they're known as. In addition to that, we also now have a proton pump inhibitor over-the-counter. So those are really the three main classes of drugs that have been used for the treatment of heartburn.
