Asklemmy @lemmy.ml Grogon @lemmy.world 4mo ago

Why can I sometimes not swallow if I wamt to?

Sometimes I malfunction and wamt to swallow but I cant. After a few tries it suddenly works. I usually bug when I breath heavily through my nose.

14 comments

This happens more frequently than you thought.

Even right now, if you try to swallow saliva multiple times as fast as you can, consecutively; you will hit a "bottleneck" :)

Oesophagus, operates on a rhythm, of which is initiated by the back of your tongue (where tonsils hit)

But, oesophagus, having mind of its own (involuntary); does not accept initiated rhythm, if it's "out of timing"

This "timing" is dictated by the way muscle contract and relax as they push saliva you just swallowed down into your tummy. Nasty yet brilliant ain't it?
- I just tried this and I’m absolutely mindblown. I can get about 3-4 swallows before my body just refuses another
  
  I got one.
  
  Sad times
  
  So you’ve never drank a big glass of water that takes more than four swallows?
  
  The reason your body won’t do more than 3-4 swallows is there’s only so much saliva it can produce per unit time.
You should get an endoscopy of your esophagus. A narrowed esophagus can have several reasons.

Reflux

Food intolerance

Fungal infection
Swallowing problems can be serious, you should see a doctor urgently.
- I tried explaining this to my ex-girlfriend, but she kept saying "you're not a real doctor!"
  
  I bet you're Johny Sins level doctor! Which means expert obviously.
This post was a good deal more innocent than I thought it was going to be.

And quite interesting.

It's a bit of a nightmare though how sometimes it's the inability to swallow that sends people into care when they age or get crook.
- I too had dirty thoughts when I read the title. My father had alzheimers and the inability to swallow was the point were the disease had progressed to where there was no real quality of life you could point to at all.
Ask him to eat more fruit, drink water and give up cigarettes
You may want to look into a condition called EoE also known as Eosinophilic esophagitis. If that's the problem, you'll certainly want to see your doctor.
Swallowing requires coordination of a lot of different muscles. Do you mean that you can’t get the swallowing process to start or that you swallow and food doesn’t go down all the way?

I had a lot of problems with the latter when I was sick with undiagnosed celiac and later developing type 1 diabetes. I’d swallow fine, but it would feel like the food was stuck in my sternum and it was very miserable. They couldn’t find anything physically wrong with my esophagus at the time. My interpretation was the esophagus was inflamed from acid reflux and thus narrowed.

14 comments