If you are one of the more than 80 million people with a sleep disorder, sleeping on a wedge pillow may be just what the physician prescribed.
Issues ranging from acid reflux to snoring and nasal congestion often make it difficult to sleep at ease in the course of the night. Sleeping on a wedge pillow can give a drug-free, efficient, easy, and low-cost physician approved solution.
What is a Wedge Pillow?
A wedge pillow is basically a foam pillow, cut on an angle, higher at the top and tapering to a thin edge that should elevate your head, shoulders and torso. It uses gravity to keep stomach acid and food down, drain sinuses and open airways. Just elevating your head on pillows or sleeping on a short wedge essentially makes numerous of these sleep problems, in particular acid reflux, worse. When you just elevate your head, you cause your body to bend in the middle, letting acid to go part way up the esophagus and get trapped.
Unrelenting Heartburn
Intermittent heartburn, the feeling of food coming back up, is not serious and may repeatedly be helped by over the counter remedies. But relentless heartburn is over and over again really GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) and left untreated, it can be serious. The esophagus is designed to carry food and liquid only one way: from the mouth to the stomach. The lining of the esophagus is sensitive and powerless to handle acid. The stomach lining is designed to resist acid containing content.
When the heartburn sufferer is upright, he or she is hardly ever bothered; but when lying down the acid goes back up the esophagus causing pain and irritating the lining of the esophagus. The acid going back up the esophagus can also cause laryngitis, hoarseness, coughing, shortness of breath, dental erosion, and sleep apnea (breathing stops frequently but temporarily during sleep). Usually, a ring of muscle called the lower esophageal sphincter prevents acid from going back up the esophagus; when this muscle stretches and no longer works as it should be; acid goes back up the esophagus when a person is lying flat.
Chronic heartburn and GERD put one at jeopardy for Barrett’s esophagus, a disease in which the lining of the esophagus develops into ulcerated and changes from its normal pink to a salmon color. The process is produced by repeated and long-term exposure to stomach acid. No more than a very small percent of people with GERD build up Barrett’s.
