An Indian woman with a rare swallowing disorder was finally treated at a Dubai hospital after several years of discomfort and pain.
For over three years, the 26-year-old, Srinidhi had been suffering from continuous chest pain, cough, weight loss with a sense of food getting stuck in her food pipe.
She lost hope as she visited many doctors and underwent many tests, as the treatments prescribed didn’t seem to treat her problem.
In June 2022, she went to an experienced Gastroenterologist and Interventional Endoscopist at Al Zahra Hospital Dubai, who, after confirming the patient’s medical history and performing an endoscopy, esophageal manometry and barium aided x-rays, found that she was suffering from a rare swallowing condition which impacts one in 100,000 people in the world.
The disorder is identified as Achalasia Cardia, which is a swallowing disorder in which the pressure of the sphincter muscle holding the passage of food from the food pipe to the stomach gets more intensive.
The doctor described that it was correlated with the incapability of the muscles in the food pipe to contract, which pushes the food down in the stomach.
A specialist Gastroenterologist at Al Zahra Hospital Dubai, Dr Gaurav Muktesh, treated her as he is among one of the few Gastroenterologists in the UAE to be skilled and trained to perform the modern advanced endoscopic procedure to treat this disorder.
Srinidhi went under a thriving ‘Peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM)’ procedure. This is an endoscopic surgery which involves dividing the muscle fibres and then releasing the pressures of the food pipe as well as the tight muscles at the lower end of the food pipe to relieve easy entry of food into the stomach.
The surgery proved to be life-changing for the patient, and she started accepting liquids that now moved smoothly via the food pipe in the stomach.
Within some days of post-surgery, she started eating normally, without undergoing any of the symptoms that she had faced earlier.