Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain

The question of why is out of scope.

In this case, docs just don’t know why. (I think it kinda pisses them off not know, tbh). And finding out is not really in their wheelhouse.

I’ve made some life changes (new job) to see what happens here. But I also have to be prepared for the possibility that it doesn’t fix it. Been working through The Body Keeps The Score as well.

Looking forward to seeing what the author discusses here.

And as you have said, avoid anything that increases stomach acid production (such as caffeine or even tea, along with spicy food).

You might also have success with Venter[1] (Sucralfate).

[1] https://www.medicinesfaq.com/brand/venter

Foods make it worse, but it’s rarely an issue if I’m in decent shape and not stressed.

The diagnosis I got from my therapist is PTSD from my chikdhood due to the strong connection between stress and body.

The only thing I found that alleviates my symptoms short term is lots of Buddhist meditation (1-2 hours per day).

I wish you all the best and thank you so much for sharing.

I suspect I have a histamine intolerance behind it all, as it tends to be comorbid with ehlers-danlos.

> The most consequential problem with BKS is its promotion of a large number of treatments, outside of EMDR, that have limited to no evidence (e.g., massage, acupuncture, yoga, community theater, and neurofeedback), according to the latest treatment guidelines by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (Frank et al., 2020), while simultaneously ignoring or criticizing PE and CPT, the two treatments with the highest quality evidence (Sakaluk et al., 2019).

https://web.archive.org/web/20250120164320/https://journals....

Chronic reflux as a symptom is almost always initially treated by PPIs because the cause among white collar workers is assumed to be chronic stress[1]. Since doctors can't "treat stress" only its symptoms, they will just tell you to try and manage stressors in your life yourself. Maybe suggest counseling but in general they are limited in what they can do. What they can do, if you are persistent in the complaint, is to just run through all the other less likely causes of it.

I was lucky omeprazole worked for me the first time. I knew exactly what was stressing me out 24/7 and the acid reflux and frequent belching combined with the "pit in my stomach" feeling was all too common and connected around my main stressor. In my case, it started 8 months after accepting a role shift from engineering into management. I was cautiously excited initially, but it just soured very quickly. I would feel physical angst parking at work every morning trying to remind myself of all the web of political infighting "what our team is hiding from this other team", "who we can discuss what with", "how that other team is actively undermining us and their other downstream partners, but how we are circumventing that" how to 4d chess maneuver yourself in the most counterproductive ways possible. It was illuminating on where a lot of those special "business requirements" come from sometimes, but it just wasn't for me. Cutting that out was a massive relief

[1]: Stress and glucocorticoids have well documented effects on the digestive system. I recommend the "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" book chapter on stress and the digestive system.

Oh definitely. Some doctors are physically incapable of uttering the words “I/We don’t know.” I know a few doctors, and have asked a couple of them about this. In private, they’re very frank about the limits of modern medicine. But in front of patients, they’re afraid any sign of uncertainty will lead to patients concluding that some other quackery is just as good as actual medicine. I can definitely understand their perspective, but it does sometimes make them come across as arrogant know-it-alls.

This, but also in particularly litigious countries like the USA, they have to be extremely careful of opening up lawsuits.

A doctor saying "I don't know." followed by a bad patient outcome has a pretty high chance of being a lawsuit.

I love smoothies with aloe Vera juice and freshly grated ginger. I’ve never felt such a powerfully calming sensation from ingesting something before. Can’t tell if it’s the ritual/association or the ingredients.

This is false. Therapy is designed to do just this and it’s readily available in different modalities that have been trialed and studied. You can book an appointment with a therapist today and start working on techniques to build stress resilience and stress handling techniques

> but Eastern medicine definitely claims to be able to. But then so do various nebulous “alternative medicines”.

Much of the allure of so-called Eastern medicines is the feeling that it’s ancient, semi-secret knowledge that is mysteriously superior to modern medicine. There are a lot of herbal medicines that kind of do something, but the effects are small and often prone to rapid tolerance build up and side effects. A large part of the efficacy is getting the patient to believe that the medicine and/or practices are a cure for their ills. Feeling like you’re tapping in to a mysterious ancient solution to stress will encourage a very strong placebo effect, which can actually reduce the stress.

Similarly, when we do randomized trials of medicines for depressive disorder it’s incredible how much the placebo group improves. When people have been told they’re receiving a treatment, it usually helps to some extent even if the treatment does nothing at all!

This exercise fixed it for me. I was diagnosed with GERD last year, I already had it for 2-3 years before that, but it got worse last year. I got ppis for a couple of months and when I finished all of them it came back worse. Fortunately I found this article, and I started doing the exercise daily morning after I woke up(and still do it). I can now eat tomatoes, food with mint, spicy food etc etc :) I have shared my experience with others and it helped them too

Edit - Changed the link, had posted something else by mistake

But I think there's still plenty more that makes it worth a read. For example, something along the lines of, sometimes a man will pop an antacid and lament that their illness is negatively affecting their work, when in fact the causality is exactly reversed

I can't say how much is placebo, but there isn't really anything mysterious about it.

It’s actually very interesting that many of the herbal compounds they use do have some quantifiable biological activities. So it’s not all placebo, but you’ll also discover that many of the herbs being sold don’t contain the ingredients they claim, don’t contain enough active ingredients to do anything, or might even be contaminated.

I once asked some doctor friends what things they’ll never do after seeing the consequences in their patients. One of the most surprising answers, to me, was that they avoided TCM and Avurvedic medicines. Apparently they see a lot of people come in with elevated liver enzymes or signs of kidney problems and discover that some TCM or Ayurvedic herbal remedy is causing the damage. Discontinuing the supplement can stop the damage. This happens with megadoses of other supplements too, especially some of the things peddled to gym bros. However, TCM and Ayurvedic supplements seem to catch people by surprise because they assume it’s safer.

Since reading the above HN comments, I have lost ten pounds and (mostly) stopped drinking carbonated beverages. My GERD is vastly reduced.

¢¢

He almost certainly suffered minor brain damage during this episode, and later, after about a decade of taking anti-protonic medications for reflux, developed exactly the abnormally rapidly growing abdominal cancer that patients who take anti-protonics apparently develop at a higher rate than similar GERD patients who don't.

I don't mean to give medical advice. I can only describe what happened in my family (which has a heritable deformation in the esophagus, leading to severe GERD). Take it with a grain of salt (and an antacid) as what it is: an anecdote from some anonymous nonexpert on the internet.

Anyhow, good luck. I'm glad to know you're working actively on the problem, not ignoring it as my father did, and I hope you find some long-term relief and peace.

Worth mentioning is I got the same symptoms (tendinitis) a few months prior to this, but went to PT and got them resolved. Bodies/minds are fun!

Thanks for the edit that added this. Very similar experience as this.

It's BS that IC ladders top out at quasi-management roles, but perhaps part of the issue is believing that professional growth is as tidy as a FAANG career ladder (since most companies just copy them wholesale), and that not reaching those rungs reflects on me in any way.

It feels a bit taboo to say, but I believe not everyone can flex into management easily, even part-time. I'm alright at it, but it clearly isn't long-term sustainable.

First of all, there ARE more steps on top of the IC ladder. They are really really exclusive though in our industry. A large company needs thousands of managers, but only a dozen or so those positions. Half those people are really smooth talkers, and the other half are truly remarkable human beings. You can set it as a challenge to yourself to shadow and follow in that direction. It might take you another 10 or 20 years and it might never happen.

The reason I don't view it as BS is because there is a limit on the amount of value a single person can generate. At the end of the day "managers" are viewed as force multipliers. Their job is to direct and control the output of 10 people. A great manager can 2x or 3x the productivity of their team compared to just 10 aimless people with no accountability or structure. Paying that person 2x or 4x is justified. Your entire career in management, from M1 -> CEO is all about trying to convince the one above you that you are a bigger force multiplier than others in your position. That's basically your job.

As an IC, you need to be someone who has had a track record of founding and delivering multiple highly profitable products/business/features/etc. Otherwise, you did, in fact, hit a ceiling of sorts.

From FAANG prospective, for an IC there is a sweet spot between their technical seniority, output vs burnout, and their compensation expectations/asks.

-https://www.healthcentral.com/digestive-health/acid-reflux-e...

-https://www.refluxguard.com/the-acid-reflux-game-changer-sle...

Does this mean that total number of daily dry swallows in bridge position was 10 or 10 times 10 (100)?

This is a book that helped me getting started: https://www.amazon.com/Roaring-Silence-Discovering-Mind-Dzog...

Putting my futon on a sheet of plywood with two concrete blocks under the head completely solved the problem within a few days. It takes a while to adapt to sleeping on an incline. I kept it up for about a year, then went back to a flat bed. I've never had acid reflux again.