Just found out soap is alkaline. If you run out of antacids and your acid reflux is really bad, can you eat soap to settle your tummy? This post inspired by eating chalk for acid reflux.
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According to my allergist, acid reflux is one of the most common allergy symptoms. Might want to get checked.
Acid reflux? I can confirm being fed soap doesn’t even fucking cure potty mouth.
I never had acid reflux. I don’t know what’s like. I feel somehow special lol.
Is varies from mildly unpleasant to a very unpleasant feeling in your throat. Sometimes it spreads to the chest, though i have never experienced that. Some day you too will feel this feeling. Try eating poorly and much for many days in a row.
Future topic of a chubby emu video in the making.
Just take a tums dude
If your heartburn lasts more than 24 hours, please, please, PLEASE go see a doctor.
I did not. I fought unrelenting heartburn for 5 days. In fairness, it did start 3 days after Thanksgiving, and I DID have the extra plate of sweet potatoes. Antacids did nothing, Pepto did nothing.
On the 5th day, the burning pain moved into my upper arms, which I did not know was a thing, and in the center of my chest it felt like I had a chunk of rock, pulling down on all my innards.
Advice nurse sent me to the ER, ER used a simple blood test to confirm the heart attack, but by day 5 the damage was done and the only fix was full blown open heart surgery.
Doc explained the heavy feeling was my heart only pumping out 30% of what it should be, and that’s right on the line of walking around, talking to people and no longer walking around, talking to people.
But isn’t heartburn all about stomach acids? How is that related to the heart? After all, these are two completely separate organs.
Heartburn is a type of pain usually caused by acid reflux, but can be mimicked by a heart attack.
Well that’s fucking terrifying
If you’re a woman the symptoms for a heart attack are different than a man’s and are often missed.
Wait, it’s possible to have a heart attack for 5 days? I thought a heart attack means your heart stops and you pass out?
Reading these comments is exposing how little I really know how cardiology. This is what it feels like to be on the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve.
A heart attack is a damaging lack of blood flow to the heart. This is very often caused by your heart beating wrong (or not at all) but can have many other causes. It’s also important to note that the heart largely does not receive oxygen from the blood inside it; it has its own set of blood vessels on the outside feeding it. Therefore you can have a heart attack even though the pumping portions are completely clear.
It’s possible for the blood flow to be slowed so far by blockages that your heart starts taking damage, yet still struggles on for five days. Definitely not a common scenario, but it does highlight just how varied and uneven heart attack symptoms are. Which just makes the whole thing that much scarier in my opinion.
That seems to be a common theme in medicine. You have a super common symptom that is usually caused by something completely harmless, but there’s also a non-zero chance that you’re absolutely screwed.
My heart actually did stop in the hospital… after the 2nd heart attack. I was asleep and had no clue until the nurse came in the room.
6AM, wake up, waiting on a stent, fiddling around on my phone. Nurse comes in.
“Were you asleep about an hour ago?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Your heart stopped for 8 seconds.”
“Ummm… thank you? I don’t know how to respond to that.”
Wow. That’s amazing. And terrifying. I hope you’re doing better now.
It’s been a struggle. I got the stent, still having trouble with my heart just stopping randomly. 4 seconds here, 5 seconds there, always when I’m asleep. Docs say it’s not concerning unless it happens when I’m awake, so I have an implanted heart monitor that calls out on my phone if there’s a problem.
There were problems with my meds that made me pass out from low blood pressure. Scared the hell out of the docs one day when I hit 58/47 in their office.
“Honest, I assure you I HAVE blood pressure, I’m sitting here talking to you, right?”
“Yeah, we don’t know how you’re doing that!”
Both are a kind of chest pain. It doesn’t really get felt in a single spot.
The better replacement is baking soda. Mix a tablespoon in a glass of water, chug. It’s gross at first, but it will annihilate heartburn.
Be warned! The reaction’s byproducts are H2O and CO2, and the reaction doesn’t end in your stomach. Be prepared to expel gas out one end and water out the other.
No! A teaspoon max.
DO NOT INGEST A TABLESPOON OF BAKING SODA.
Don’t normally have acid reflux, but last night I hit a tablespoon, three times over the night. Yes, that’s quite a bit.
That’s a lot! What was the effect? Have you taken that much before?
In my own experience if I take more than a teaspoon in maybe a four hour period, I start getting undigested leaves coming out the other end.
I love doing this. It’s like an elementary school science project in my tummy.
You’ll notice the gas, but the water comes from the acid being neutralized and won’t really be detectable. You just drank a glass of water too, that’s way more water than a tablespoon of baking soda can produce.
The H2O comes from the reaction.
NaHCO₃ (baking soda) + HCl (hydrochloric acid) → NaCl (sodium chloride) + H₂O (water) + CO₂ (carbon dioxide)
Water is created. Now pass that through your entire digestive tract full of HCl. Now H20 pops up, uh, where it’s not normally in the pipeline. Does that make sense? You now have water where your guts weren’t prepared to process it?
In any case, I shit straight liquid if I have to do this trick.
Sounds like a treatment for constipation too then
The burp let’s you know it’s working, and who couldn’t benefit from extra hydration?
Research the acid reflux diet. It’s helped me. No onions. Limit tomatoes. No mint. Minimal citrus. No multivitamin (this seems unique to me) . No vitamin D (me again).
On the good list for me Gum, specifically bubblegum with no mint Vanilla ice cream. Milk
Bette Middler swears by this to preserve her voice
I wouldn’t eat soap simply because it’s amphiphilic, which is why, well, it makes good soap. The molecules have a hydrophilic and a lipophilic side and this will much rather soap off and severely damage the lining of your digestive route, potentially and probably also resulting in dangerous foaming.
If you take the most simple soap that’s just like potassium ions and negatively charged fatty acid residues, I’m not 100% sure but I doubt that the fatty acids want to accept a proton because they are rather stable when negatively charged, hence they won’t work well to buffer the stomach acid. And again, by the time that the fatty acid thinks about accepting a proton or not it will most likely be soaping up your cells’ membranes.
While technically feasible with pure soap in small amounts (which is lye fully reacted with food grade oil/fats), the stuff you find in stores will have stuff like:
- Conditioner
- Perfume
- Coloring
All of which are likely to cause irritation on your intestines and worsen the overall acid flux experience.
If you need to do this experiment for some reason, make sure you know exactly what is in it. Most likely any “safe-ish” soap is more expensive than antacids or food-grade chalk.
Fun fact: Old timey cheap industry soap (plain tallow and lye) used to be popular with rats and mice.
Don’t eat soap.
Just keep extra anti acid on hand. I have bottles in almost every room and in my car.
You may want to look into getting some preventative OTC pills like Omeprazole or Famotadine. If it’s constant reflux, you may want to schedule a visit with a doc, ulcers are a thing and don’t get better without meds.
My doctor got me off omeprazole because there’s a link between long term use (10 years+) and kidney failure. So I do prescription strength famotidine twice a day and just take tums as needed, then in the summer when I’m drinking a lot, I switch to omeprazole for a few months. It’s working pretty good so far, but I go through tums like crazy.
As a quick remedy for acid reflux, I recommend Marie Biscuits or Rich Tea Biscuits. They kind of seem to absorb the acid reflux… I don’t know how it works, but I always used to have a pack of those Biscuits in my bag when I used to have regular acid reflux. They worked very well for me. Of course, changing my diet and lifestyle worked much better and now I haven’t had acid reflux in years.
Maybe. If you want to trade heartburn for intense diarrhea.
I’ll gladly take diarrhea over heartburn.
Each to their own, I suppose.
My dude omeprozol exists and is cheap. One tiny pill a day…
Only works if you take it in advance. There’s not really anything that helps when you wake up at 3 am and think you are dying - other than puking, which makes the problem worse long term.
Tums or Pepto will give you instant relief, while you wait for the proton pump inhibitors to kick in.
Pepcid complete. It’s a life saver
Oh I know it and I have a bad time if I forget to take it. But once you make a habit of taking the pill it sure is life changing.
Do you take it daily? As in, forever?
Pretty much
I have read it can be counterproductive in the long term… That’s why I stopped (and because I didn’t consult a medic for it) I took it for more than 3 months daily and it didn’t take all my symptoms (feeling so full after meals and dyspnoea).
I think esomeprazole would be a better fit for reflux, but I am unsure.
I take two of the quick dissolving ones if I feel the burn.
Well, no, not really.
Reflux is a definite no because that’s not “just” heartburn. Treating chronic reflux with something like tums or rolaids isn’t a great idea to begin with, and soap would cause even more problems.
But, even “just” heartburn is a no.
For one, the Ph is too high. You want to bring the acid to neutral, or close, in the esophagus; and the Ph of most soap is going to take it way past neutral and into alkaline.
Most soaps? They’re bad for skin because the Ph is too high. It fucks up all kinds of stuff, and the more delicate the skin, the worse the effect. Like, your average soap is going to run around 9-10. Skin is around 5-6. The esophagus is going to hover around 7 normally, with it going to around 4 or below during chronic reflux (with occasional bouts staying a tad closer to 5 or 6). Most antacids would end up being around 8ish, at least the brand names.
I’d have to run the math to figure out what exactly the results would be with a pure alkaline being swallowed in terms of end Ph, but it doesn’t really matter. Soap isn’t a pure alkaline. It’s a mix of things. Mind you, that’s all sketched out since I’m at the very limit of my chemistry here, but the general idea holds. Don’t try and use my numbers on a test or anything.
And that mix, even though it won’t kill you or even put you in a hospital barring weird shit going on, ain’t going to settle your stomach. For one, the most common effect of swallowing soap is vomiting. Kids get into soap occasionally, and they puke it back up more often than not. Idiot adults sometimes get drunk and take bets, or dares, or whatever other stupidity is going on. They vomit it back up in any but the smallest amounts.
What they don’t vomit up is going to come out the other end with some force. Some people used to use small amounts of soapy water as a laxative. And it works
I don’t see a lot of vomiting followed by hours (potentially) of nausea being a good result to treat reflux.
What if it’s just a little nibble? Less mass means less hydroxide ions
I think that if it’s small enough to not cause nausea or other problems, it’s probably too small to neutralize the acid either.
