**10. Patient education and preventive measures**

Clinicians should work closely with people who are recovering from infectious esophagitis and encourage them to keep all their follow-up medical appointments in order to monitor their progress and treatments outcomes.

The clinicians can suggest the following steps to patients that have ongoing symptoms of painful or difficulty in swallowing:


• Sleeping in flat position should be avoided, and the head of the bed should be elevated by several inches, i.e., six inch blocks. It is also important to discourage patients from sleeping with extra pillows as this may increase intra-abdominal pressure caused by people bending at the waist level.

The importance seeking early medical evaluation at the onset of symptoms should be emphasized to the patients and the general population in health education/health promotion campaigns. In addition, the importance of taking medicines with plenty of water while sitting upright in order to avoid the complications of drug-induced esophagitis should be highlighted to the patients.

Clinicians should also avoid the prescription of certain medications like alendronate in patients with obvious esophageal varices. It should also be noted that giving alendronate to patients who are cirrhotic could precipitate gastrointestinal bleeding from erosions over an esophageal varix.
