While some patients get ‘lucky’ and are cured with the right drug, game changer patients, including those with achalasia, are still often left with a malformed esophagus. This article addresses this issue, and how achalasia can be treated without surgery.
Although there are currently no surgical procedures available for treating achalasia, they do exist, and if you are a game changer patient you most likely have one already. If you have one that can be surgically corrected or has already been surgically corrected, you definitely want to have your esophagus checked out, but there are a number of other ways to prevent or correct achalasia.
If you are a game changer patient, you know the problem: you have a heart problem that causes a malformed esophagus. Achalasia is an esophageal condition caused by a problem with the esophagus. If you have this condition, you may have some of the symptoms, which include having your esophagus stick out like a sore thumb, not being able to eat a normal meal, or swallowing large amounts of food.
I’m a game changer patient. I have a malformed esophagus. So I’m not the first or only game changer patient to show this symptom. I’m the first to show esophageal achalasia, which is a condition that causes the esophagus to stick out like a sore thumb. The other game changer patients have achalasia that causes the esophagus to stick out like a sore thumb in one area, but not in another.
The game changer patient is a person who can eat and drink normally, but also has one of the most serious esophageal conditions, esophageal achalasia. This disease often causes the esophagus to stick out like a sore thumb, and, similar to achalasia, causes the esophagus to stick out in one area, but not in another.
This disease is a congenital disorder and is usually inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion. Because of this it is not easily detectable until it has progressed to the stage when surgery is needed. Unfortunately, these patients cannot be detected early enough to save them, and if they are not detected early enough the disease progresses and can be fatal.
There are two main forms of esophageal achalasia – congenital and acquired. Acquired forms are usually caused by injury to the esophagus in which case the patient will have a much larger size of the esophagus and the risk of complications will be much higher. In the latter case, the esophagus may never grow at all; in this case the patient will have a very small esophagus with no visible symptoms.
Esophageal achalasia is a very rare disease. In fact, it is the only one in which the patient is not diagnosed until the end stage. Many of these cases are actually misdiagnosed as asthma (which may be caused by the same underlying condition). For these patients with esophageal achalasia, there is no effective treatment or cure and instead they simply die of starvation and dehydration.
For some people, esophageal achalasia is the first symptom of a more serious condition which may also involve the heart, esophagus, breathing, or digestive system. In these cases, the patient may have a heart murmur, coughing, choking, spasm, or weight loss.
Here’s one of the patients we are currently seeing, an 80-year-old man with esophageal achalasia. He came to our clinic because of progressive dyspnea and choking. His condition was previously misdiagnosed as gastro esophageal reflux disease and he was prescribed medication to treat the reflux. However, the medications were supposed to prevent his heartburn, but they didn’t.