Atonic Stomach

by Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

Constant snacking?

It can cause a pendulous stomach that hangs down to the crotch. (Seriously! It’s more common than you think.)

Overeating can do the same.

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Taking baking soda with meals?

Routinely, it can hinder peristalsis and also create a pendulous stomach.

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The stomach is a reflex to the upper pec (pectoralis major clavicular), so an atonic stomach can lead to sagging breasts.

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Alfred E. Barclay, M.D. (The Stomach and Œsophagus: A Radiographic Study, 1913) wrote …

“Retention of food is found when the peristalsis fails to empty the stomach, and the patient nearly always complains that he feels his ‘food lying on his stomach’ for hours. Tonic action is called into play continuously, for the stomach is never empty, and by degrees the stomach becomes atonic. Owing to the failure of tone, the stomach becomes stretched, the muscle is thinned out and cannot produce peristaltic waves of the same power as formerly. Not only so, but the work it is called upon to do in lifting the food to the pylorus increases as the greater curvature sags down towards the pelvis. Even when the stomach becomes quite atonic, its lowest border sometimes as low as the sympathetic pubis, I have very seldom, if ever, failed to see evidence of peristalsis, provided the apparatus was working efficiently. In one of these atonic cases I found quite a quantity of bismuth food in the stomach five days after it had been given, in spite of persistent vomiting.”

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