Inspired by another thread, “What bodily quirks/mutations/oddities do you have?”, I figured that I would start my own thread about a strange problem I have always had: I cannot belch. I am a 28 year old, otherwise healthy, physically-fit male, yet I have never been able to belch in my life. . . well – my mother claims she was able to successfully burp me as an infant, and I’ll just have to take her word for it.
In any event, I am not alone in this regard. Here is a link to an article abstract at PubMed.com : Dysfunction of the belch reflex. A cause of incapacitating chest pain - PubMed
The author of the article calls the problem, “Dysfunction of the Belch Reflex.”
A google search of “dysfunction of the belch reflex” or “I cannot burp” or phrases of this nature turn up plenty of results, which describe exactly the condition that I have.
If I eat too fast, or drink any carbonated beverage, I experience a severe pressure in my upper chest. If I try to push the air out, by flexing certain muscles that I can only imagine would result in a burp in a normal person, I instead produce these strange gurgling noises. This is described in the above abstract. These noises can be extremely loud, and they are quite unusual sounding. After a “gurgle,” I feel relief for a few moments – that is, until the air returns to its previous position, and again places pressure in my upper chest.
So, when I join friends for a beer, I am out of completely out of commission if I have more than one. I become so bloated and uncomfortable that it is unbearable.
My first memories of this being a problem for me go back to when I was a young child. I remember having a very severe stomach flu and vomiting all night. For many months thereafter, I would constantly feel, what I interpreted as, the urge to vomit, and, having no frame of reference, I would conclude that I caught the stomach flu again. I would have my mother follow me to the bathroom, where I would stand over the toilet and wait for something to happen. All I would do is produce these gurgles. After a few of them, my mother would tell me that my stomach was just upset and I should just lay down, while telling my father that I had a bad case of hypochondria.
Of course, I know now that what was really going on was that I had to burp, but had mistaken this feeling for nausea, given that that stomach flu experience was so fresh in my mind.
What can I do to relieve this intense upper chest pressure? The quickest, most effective relief comes if I stick my fingers down my throat and manually stimulate my gag reflex. If I do this, I will unleash violent, thunderous burps. After a few goes at this, I will feel completely fine. Yet, this simply is not practical in most situations. For one, it sounds like I am vomiting, and it can be excruciatingly loud. I did this once on a camping trip; I walked away from the campsite and ‘pulled the trigger.’ When I returned, my friends asked me if I had heard “the dying animal.” When I informed them that, it was, indeed, I who was “the dying animal,” they refused to believe it. I had to chug a beer just for the sake of reproducing the noise to demonstrate I was actually capable of emitting such unnatural sounds.
Additionally, I have been kicked out of bars for doing this in their bathrooms. Security assumes that I have been over-served, and am vomiting due to drunkenness.
Of course, the most common reason why I would feel this pressure is if I had just gotten done eating, and ate too fast. If I am in a restaurant, ‘pulling the trigger’ is obviously not a viable solution. First, the process will naturally cause me to throw up my dinner, throwing away the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Second, my sickening retching will be heard throughout the entire establishment, causing a commotion guaranteed to be bad for business.
Alternatively, I can lay down either on my back, or on my right side. Interestingly, if I lay on my left side, I will continue to feel this pressure, and the gurgling will ensue. Yet, unless I am lying down for an extended period of time, as soon as I sit or stand back up, the pressure returns.
When I tell people about this problem, I usually encounter the following series of responses: 1) disbelief; 2) the question, “well, didn’t your mom burp you as a child”; 3) the person will ask me if I currently need to burp; 4) I will respond in the affirmative; 5) the person will insist on pounding me on my back to induce a burp. This never works. Then 6) they will ask why I do not just “swallow air,” to induce a burp. First of all, this suggestion has always puzzled me. I have no clue what it means to “swallow air.” I breathe many times a day, and this is about as close as I can get to this concept. That said, the more important point is that I already have an abundance of air in me that I am trying to expel, so adding to this reservoir of unwanted air certainly cannot help. But, believe me, I have done everything I can to “swallow air” just to be sure, to no avail.
Have I ever brought this up to a doctor? Yes, I have, but only to my primary care doctors over the years, who respond in a very similar way as I have laid out above. The problem is not taken seriously. I have never been to a gastroenterologist about it. I probably should see one, and see what he or she says. However, it seems that many people, who have written about this problem of theirs online, have found nothing that works, even after seeing a gastroenterologist.
To be clear, I do not have acid reflux disease or anything like that. There are no other symptoms. The only problem is that I cannot push air out of my stomach during digestion, except if I manually stimulate my gag reflex, or wait for the air to pass through the other end, which it will eventually do if I lay down.
Does anybody else have this problem? Has anybody known anybody who has this problem? And, I can only hope, has anybody figured out any way to overcome it?
