My husband has GERD and now has cancer of the esophagus partially as a result of not treating that. The medicines he takes now help him not throw up so often.

Medicine does not cure you, only your body can do that. But medicines can help your body get to a position where it has an easier time of it and you have fewer symptoms.

I take an anti-inflammatory daily for my arthritis, otherwise I have a great deal of pain and can not walk well. It's a choice I make. You have to try the meds and see if they make you feel better and if feeling better is more/less important than what side or long-term effects there may be. My appendix burst and I had an infection wandering around for 5 months before the right combination of antibiotics finally knocked it out. Meanwhile, I had too much of the wrong antibiotics and it wrecked some of my health now in the future. But I'm alive and I would not have been and I did not have to be operated on again, etc. and I like that better than the alternative would have been?

Too much stomach acid is not a good thing. Yes you need some to digest your food, etc. but if there is too much or it gets in the wrong place because another part of your body cannot deal with it (inflammation wrecking linings, making them not work) things just get worse and worse. And if you have the inflammation from a not-every-good diet, the playing field is skewed and just eating better is not going to work fast enough, if at all. Medicine can provide support to a better diet so it can work quicker and you can maybe quite taking the medicine quicker. But not taking the medicine probably means things will get worse and they can only get so much worse before they can get unfixable!

I would give myself the gift of a one-week experiment. I'd figure out what to eat for a week (only) and I'd take the prescribed medicine and eat the healthy diet I'd decided on and keep a journal about how much better/worse I felt. Only after that would I start messing with the medicines and think about which I felt helped me and which were not worth their side effects, etc.

Deciding not to eat at all because you currently cannot have bacon? There are lots of foods out there, get experimental and try some you have not before. I am having "fun" because my husband needs a very bland, "unhealthy" diet to help control his negative radiation and chemotherapy side effects. I had to buy white bread the other day! I was almost at a loss, trying to choose as we switched over to whole wheat and I researched that religiously (most fiber, less sugar, etc.) back 6-7 years ago and we did taste tests, etc. So, looking around for the "Wonder" bread (the "white" bread is not my white bread from the 1950's anymore :-) and trying to figure out and get my head around the importance of calories and eating at all at the moment versus "healthy" had me almost laughing, it seemed so ridiculously hard based on my current healthier habits.

Try weird stuff that you would not dream of trying before, just to see what you can see? Read nutrition books and try to optimize nutrition and taste at the same time. My husband hates broccoli, even smothered in cheese :-) so I promised him I would still not serve him broccoli, not matter what, while we go through this, LOL. But I "taught" myself to eat liver, for example, and now like it. And fresh tuna! I'd steered away from it because it is only cooked "rare" and I thought it would be fishy and unbearable but "blackened" at this one local restaurant, it tastes just like filet mignon! Who knew? You have to try things instead of letting your imagination tell you what it thinks you might want to hear?