Acid reflux in General... How does it affect one’s voice and vocal anatomy as a whole?

More and more people have been calling our professional vocal school and its division, The Royans Institute for Non-Surgical Voice Repair, and addressing that they are suffering from a very unpleasant problem – acid reflux, which not only has been affecting their internal gastric anatomy, but also has been known to affect the quality of their voice.

Some of them have been concerned about their singing voice, but a lot of them were just ordinary people, whose speech was also compromised by the nasty symptoms of Acid Reflux. The presence of this condition has been literally burning and inflaming their vocal cords. In this case, the throat flora gets disturbed, and people also quite often experience a sharp pain in the throat.  Besides which, their inflamed vocal cords usually become thicker thus making their surface feel (by their own description) as rough as sandpaper...

The recent client with the above-described symptoms revealed that she was ordered a gastric intestinal operation to close a valve which was producing an excess amount of acid, and in turn, was, so to speak, shooting directly into her vocal anatomy as well as everywhere else.

Her question to me was, “If I do this operation, do I still need to fix my voice?”

I, myself,  happen to quite often watch a lot of hospital-themed shows. 
Therefore, I gave her a description (from one of the episodes from one of those shows) of a trauma patient admitted to the emergency room with multiple problems and injuries. The aforementioned patient had arrived at the emergency room with neurological trauma, internal bleeding, broken limbs and a heart problem.

He obviously needed emergency surgery. 

Would there be only one doctor operating on the patient? Needless to say, it would be quite ridiculous to assume that.

Obviously, in the above-described case, there will be required several specialists i.e., a brain surgeon, an internal medicine specialist, an orthopedic doctor and a cardiologist. Therefore, I had to convey my message to my future client with the explanation that I will be taking care of her vocal anatomy, which, in my observation, had been already quite bruised by the excess of gastric acid and even more so, by the wrong application of the speaking voice.  No doubt, in her case (and nevertheless) the sound of the voice has been coming out from the throat area and, thus, got pulled into her neck muscles. 

The latter is very dangerous by itself, as by pushing her voice from the wrong set of muscles, she might've easily acquired what's called muscle tension dysphonia.  In that case, she, evidently, has been pushing and, nevertheless, pulling the sound of her voice until she was not able to push it any longer. That is how it landed and got trapped in her neck muscles.

That, in turn, could actually produce a disorder that's called fibromyalgia and, possibly, due to that, the person could acquire other nasty symptoms and also related disorders.
We also had clients who suffered from fibromyalgia who had thought that their speaking and singing problems were caused by it...
Evidently, it is actually the other way around. 

So, in the case of my aforementioned client, not only physically and structurally, I needed to fix the vocal anatomy, but I also had to teach her how to speak using the set of facial muscles - working in conjunction and coordination with the abdominal muscles, assuring that the described above voice problems would not occur ever again. While mechanically fixing her voice problems, natural herbal and some homeopathic remedies also were applied internally aiding a great deal in the healing of her vocal anatomy.  They were taken simultaneously while she was learning the different (unique) application - mechanically speaking, of the sound of her speaking and even her singing voice. 

Does it negate the operation, you, my reader, may ask? In this case, probably not, as now, the internal medicine surgeon would have to fix the valve, the non-closure of which produced the problem in the first place.

My client works for the school board and speaks a lot and even, sometimes, sings for elementary school students.

So maybe, in a way, it has been some kind of a blessing, as, by osmosis, my client actually learned how to speak and sing more adequately, which, no doubt, will allow her to save and, nevertheless, protect her voice (speaking and/or singing) for a lifetime!!