All About Ulcers, Antacids, and How Little We Know

Even before I began high school, I can remember suffering regularly from hunger pains. These were not the normal pains of a growing boy, nor were they the result of poverty. We always had enough food, even though we were poor. Several years later at Fort Meade, Maryland, 1 developed intense stomach pains again. They were probably precipitated by stress in anticipation of combat. Fort Meade was the point of embarkation for the European theater of war. After admission to the hospital, a barium X-ray series revealed a duodenal ulcer. I can remember my mother’s tears of joy when the army surgeon told her that I had to be medically discharged. While the war in Germany was nearly over, Japan had not yet surrendered, and indeed many of my buddies arrived in Europe at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. In those days, the so-called Sippy diet, I named after Bertram Sippy, was very popular in the treatment of ulcers. So the army nurses brought me delicious eggnogs made of milk and raw eggs. This was similar to the diet I had followed in school. In New York, for ten cents, you could get an enormous malted milk at almost any corner candy store. I often did, and the “hunger pains” went away. About ten years ago, I went to see a Boston physician, Russell S. Boles, about my ulcer. After 25 years of just living with it, I had gone to see him at the urging of Harold Anderson, who formed the Randex Corporation with my friend, Murray Rosenberg. Boles spoke to me at length and gave me this rather philosophical recap on ulcers. According to Boles, there are about a dozen different therapies for ulcers. All of them work, because if you wait long enough, most uncomplicated ulcers eventually heal by themselves. You might see an ulcer in an X-ray one day, and within days or weeks it is gone. Boles explained the cyclical nature of ulcers, and how they can often recur after healing. While in some cases the pain can be intense when it occurs, it inevitably goes away. In the interim, one adopts one of the “cures” to obtain temporary relief. My position as president of a modern corporation conforms with the popular notion that ulcer victims tend to be harddriving business executives. However, many professionals are obsessive about their work. And since they and I enjoy our work, it is simplistic to conclude that our life-styles are necessarily more stressful than the next person’s. The popular notion of “executive ulcer” is, at best, oversimplified.2.3 But beyond that, unequivocal answers about what causes peptic ulcers are hard to come by. Peptic ulcers are actual holes that develop in the mucous membrane that lines the digestive tract, the mucosa. When they occur in the stomach, they are called gastric ulcers. More frequently, they occur in that part of the small intestine into which the stomach empties its contents, the duodenum. In