One Man's Addiction

Doctors have long fretted because peptic ulcer patients stubbornly ignored their warnings that sodium bicarbonate, the kitchen's ever-present help in time of heartburn, may cause alkali poisoning and dangerous gaseous distention of the stomach. But it remained for Glasgow's Dr. Andrew Greig Melrose to report, in the Scottish Medical Journal, a case of outright addiction to bicarb, an addiction so intense that the victim suffered severe withdrawal sickness when taken off the stuff.

The patient, a male nurse, was only 29 when a doctor told him to take sodium bicarbonate routinely for his duodenal ulcer. He did so with a vengeance: even when he had no pain, he took 2 lbs. a week, managed to consume almost 1 1/2 tons in 27 years, until he came to Dr. Melrose's attention. Then, in hospital because of a stroke, he was denied bicarbonate. "This at once produced a violent emotional reaction," reported Dr. Melrose, "and he became restless, aggressive and difficult to handle." The doctors decided to taper him off, gave him successively smaller doses until at last the bicarb was completely withdrawn.

Oddly enough, Dr. Melrose found that the patient's ulcer had little to do with his addiction. Main reason: he enjoyed the distention of his stomach by gas (carbon dioxide generated by the action of digestive hydrochloric acid on the bicarbonate) and the resultant belching.

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