In my experience hv's (and doctors too) are used to telling people to wean refluxing babies early, but it's not necessarily based on any good research. Ds2 had silent reflux and the hv even wrote in his red book that I would start him on baby rice once a day, when I had no intention of doing so. I stuck it out until 6 months and was happy that I had waited.
There was a review article in 2002 pointing out that many of the nonpharmacological and nonsurgical measures recommended for managing reflux actually haven't been shown to make any difference to the level of reflux (as measured by pH probes etc.). Sorry if this is depressing but if we're going to make changes to try and improve our lives as parents of refluxers, we might as well make sure the changes are the right ones.
And although introduction of solid food may make the reflux easier to deal with by reducing the amount of puke, the acid can still affect the oesophagus. Another (more recent) paper concluded that the presence or absence of vomiting doesn't predict how much oesophagal damage there is.
Yes, I found playgroups difficult too. People can be so dismissive of reflux. I started to call it 'severe reflux' but even then, no-one really understood what we were going through. And the weight gain thing really is a double-edged sword, isn't it? I was 'lucky' that ds2's weight gain dropped so rapidly the medical profesionals had to take notice of us. But after that, when he was doing really badly and hadn't put on any more weight, they were very reluctant to up the doses of any drugs, even if I said they weren't working properly at the current dose. Because the dosage was linked to his weight, of course, and given that the drugs aren't licensed for infants in any case, the doctors were very wary of using high doses. I got the best result when I spoke to our paediatrician's secretary with ds2 screaming in the background - and she only had to put up with less than a minute of it, compared to god knows how much in every 24 hours of our day.
There are some good international web-based discussion groups for parents of kids with reflux. I've found the infantreflux.org forums good, and Yahoo!groups breastfeedingreflux , and the PAGER newsletter is also useful for keeping up to date with the latest developments. So even if your real-life community doesn't provide much help, you can get online support. It makes so much difference knowing that others understand what you are going through.
Hope some of this helps