Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This review is divided into 2 sections: 1) *PERSONAL ESSAY* details my own experiences with acid reflux/GERD for the past 20 years (age 8 to age 27) so you can decide for yourself if your experiences are similar to mine [...and assume that you may respond to this enzyme similarly]. 2) *UPDATE AND SUMMARY* for if you want a quick update and summary after 12 months of use. *PERSONAL ESSAY* This portion of the review may seem overly dramatic to many, but its not an over-exaggeration. There are many underlying conditions that can cause acid-reflux, so this product probably won't work for everyone. I will relate my own personal story so you can evaluate for yourself how similar your own condition may be. From the age of ~8 years old, I began having frequent indigestion with certain types of foods. Around the age of 9, I first experienced acid-reflux from drinking too much Vanilla Coca-Cola. It happened in the middle of the night, and I would wake up to drink water hoping that it would go away. This would happen from time to time until the age of 18/19 when I started drinking coffee alongside the rest of America. The acid-reflux got pretty bad in a short amount of time. Within one year, I went from daily Tums to Pepcid Complete. These things weren't working very well and I consistently worked towards improving my diet. By 21, my lunch consisted of Greek yogurt, an apple or banana, broccoli, carrots, and maybe peanut butter or lunch meat. For PPIs, I started with Omeprazole, then Lansoprazole 15mg, then Nexium 20mg. These would always work for a short while, but eventually lost effectiveness. I also tried dexilant, aciphex... Towards the end, I eventually found that 30mg x 2 (60mg total daily) Prevacid worked best for me, but things were getting worse and I had nowhere else to go with the medication. Between the ages of 21 and 22, I started having right-sided abdominal pain. It started hurting around lunch time and would stick around the entire day and would even keep me up at night. I needed to sleep on my right side with a hand under my stomach to even fall asleep. In order to combat GERD, I started getting stricter and trying out different things. I've had entire weeks, where my entire diet consisted of broccoli, cucumber, kale, spinach, almonds, raw honey, raw sunflower seeds, and raw pumpkin seeds (without any wiggle room). Of the various remedies I've tried: no gluten for 1 month, no dairy for 1 week, 5 day course of antibiotics for H. Pylori (even though the biopsy came out negative, I took antibiotics illegally - I wouldn't suggest anyone do this), various elimination diets, drank non-fluoridated drinking water for 2 months, apple cider vinegar, probiotics, enzymes, other meditation, and a whole host of other things I can't even remember. I'm 26 years old now [edit: I'm 27 now, 1 year later]. I've had dozens of scopes, scans, allergy panels, thyroid tests, etc. to determine the cause of GERD and abdominal pain, and the physicians were clueless. I've been to ~5 family practice doctors and 3 GI specialists (1 was even from a top 20 hospital in the USA). All would give few answers and continue prescribing PPIs. I've been talking to my specialists about having the Nissen Fundiplication surgery for about 2 years now, but they've admitted that my hiatal hernia didn't look to bad and that the fundiplication may not help too much, because it seemed as though a lot of my problem was due to chronic inflammation of the stomach. Wait, chronic inflammation of the stomach? Why did I have chronic inflammation of the stomach? This is something the doctors could never tell me - read on. The acid-reflux has literally made the years from age 24-26 a nightmare. Imagine having some horrendous pain that never goes away... My girlfriend would ask me to go to a party or go downtown to have a few drinks (just like any normal person would), and all I could do was get upset with her. All I wanted to do was sit on the couch and focus/hope that my pain would go away. Its like when you have a horrible headache and someone keeps asking you questions - you just want that person to stop talking to you and go away. I haven't had many friends and I haven't been going out much anymore at all. I can't drink, I can't enjoy normal foods, and I'm in chronic pain all the time, so why would I go out with other people when I can't even enjoy talking to them? I got diagnosed with Barretts Esophagus two years ago, a condition that greatly increases your risk of esophageal cancer - a cancer that has a 90-95% mortality rate after diagnosis!!! So not only was I suffering out of my mind, I could only think that this suffering would only end with my premature death. In the past few years, this has caused me to be very depressed. I started seeing a psychiatrist who put me on stimulants just so I wouldn't sleep 12-16 hrs a day and at least could get some work done from a computer chair. I was finally resigned to getting the fundiplication surgery. All I could think at this point was, "If this doesn't work, what's next? A gun to my head? I'm 26 now and this is getting worse every month, what will it be like when I'm 35?". I couldn't even imagine that level of torment... I'm sorry if that offends some of you, but for those that have been there, maybe you know how I felt. I was supposed to get the surgery about 1 month after making this post. I went ahead and tried some last ditch efforts before moving ahead with the surgery that essentially wraps part of your stomach around your esophagus - a stomach that was already chronically inflamed. I ended up here somehow, looking at this product. After trying apple cider vinegar and all those other remedies, I doubted it would work, but I went ahead anyways. I don't think I had anything else left to try. The theory is that for some people, the stomach doesn't create enough acid (opposed to too much) and cannot digest food properly. This keeps food sitting in the stomach and keeps the stomach full of food and full of constant pressure. When you eat dinner, your lunch may still be in your stomach and its just too much for the stomach to handle. Some food may go through into the intestines and cause IBS for some people (this never happened to me). According to others on here, in order for it to work properly, I had to quit the PPIs cold turkey. I will admit, these first 3 days were a freaking nightmare. I immediately jumped up to taking 3-4 of these Betaine HCL pills with each meal (with another supplement called Raw Enzymes for Men, by Garden of Life). On the fourth day, it was gone.... I didn't have acid-reflux. On the fifth day, sixth day, seventh day, no acid reflux... There were little bits of it here or there, but it could be settled with a half of a Tums tablet or by taking an extra Betaine HCL pill or enzyme pill and waiting for a few minutes. Some sort of miracle seems to have happened. It is possible that I'm having some short relief and that it will come back in a few weeks (this has happened before with other remedies I've tried), but I'm keeping all my fingers and toes crossed. I will keep this post updated if I find that the benefit suddenly disappears. While I'm not big on conspiracy theories, I have lost a lot faith in the medical system through this agonizing process. Apparently, most medical groups don't even recognize low stomach acid as a potential reason for acid reflux at all!! Billions of dollars are spent every year on PPIs; however, a much much smaller fraction of money goes to fund any research related to acid reflux... it seems as though many medical groups believe that acid-reflux has been figured out and that PPIs and Fundiplication surgerys are the way to go. To anyone out there suffering - don't lose hope. People (like myself) are finding ways to resolve their issues on their own. Keep looking! *UPDATE AND SUMMARY* Its 11/30/2015. I've been on this supplement for one year and its the first year in my entire life I've witnessed an improvement to my GERD related symptoms - a dramatic improvement.... I've transformed my life during this time, and much of it is attributable to this dirt cheap supplement. There's been so many times in the past year that I was 'out and about' and forgot to bring these enzymes to a meal - in those moment when I allow myself to 'slip', I get a harrowing reminder that A) these enzymes work, and B) what my life used to be like every day, before I started using Betaine HCL. To put it simply, you need to take 2-7 of these every meal, depending on the meal and how 'inefficient' your stomach is. For me, I average 4/meal. Other suggest that you start out taking 2 capsules and 'work your way up'. When you've taken too many, you will know - You feel a slight burning sensation in your esophagus and stomach - At this point, you know to take 1 or 2 less than that amount, or whatever amount eliminates your GERD. You still need to be careful what you eat. If chocolate, alcohol, caffeine, etc. gave you horrible reflux before, you will still need to avoid these things. In the essay above, you will notice that I had eliminated all of these 'triggers' and literally had my diet down to 5 or so ingredients at a time, with items such as cooked spinach or raw pumpkin seeds, and still had horrible reflux. During usage of this product, you actually want to avoid Tums, PPIs, H2 blockers, etc. because they cause the opposite of what this product does. You want to improve the efficiency of your stomach's digestion (which will reduce inflammation), and all of those other things that provide relief for a few hours or days only impair this process. Good luck to all. GERD is a horrible plague on modern western society that doesn't get enough attention and useful, unbiased (i.e. not corporate controlled) information is hard to come by.