Since doctors are already cutting this and snipping that when babies are born, why not just go ahead and snip this little guy out as well? It doesn’t seem to do anything except serve as a punching bag in cartoons, and it gives both the owner & his/her spouse nights of restless sleep from snoring.
Right now I am intensely aware of it because my throat is a little swollen and I can feel it back there like a chunk of last night’s grilled cheese sandwich that I can’t seem to either swallow or hack up. And my coworkers are getting a little tired of listening to me try…
Does this thing serve any useful purpose? Dictionary.com was not much help other than to tell me that it was a fleshy somthing-or-other hanging down from the back of the soft palate.
Try breathing through your nose while swallowing, and then tell me if your uvula does anything… The Uvula is there to prevent swallowed food from entering your nasal sinuses, though apparently the action is negated by laughing with milk in your mouth. Plus, many languages, like French, have a “uvular trill R” which is a fun sound to make.
Well, it appears a topic has drawn me out.
Actually, I have had Uvulopalatoplasty as treatment for sleep apnea, and the one main drawback I have found is that food and drink tend to head toward the lungs more often than before the surgery. They also like to enter the nasal cavity. Either one of these is rather uncomfortable; to say the least, and choking becomes much easier.
Indeed, I asked my mother the nurse exactly that question when I was kid. She explained to me that the uvula is instrumental in the swallow-choke-gag continuum of things.
I thought that blocking the nasal cavities was a function of the entire soft palate, I can’t imagine the uvula swinging up to plug that hole while swallowing. I thought that the glottis and/or the epiglottis was responsible for keeping liquids out of our breathing passages; the uvula doesn’t seem to be in the right place to do that.
Anyways, my throat is much better and I’ve decided to keep it now
He said the uvula keeps stuff out of your SINUSES, not your windpipe. Sinuses up, windpipe down. Its in the right place.
As an aside, I once had a semi-uvulaectomy or whatever you call it. I developed a polyp on the tip of my uvula, it had a growth about an inch and a half long hanging down from it. I noticed it when it got long enough to start tickling the back of my throat, it felt like I had to clear my throat all the time. I looked down my throat in the mirror one day, and was horrified at what I saw!
I went to the doctor, and he made a little “lasso” out of a piece of surgical suture, lassoed the dangling tissue, and adjusted the lasso’s position to pinch off the tissue where the uvula was supposed to end. Then he tightened the loop, cut off the polyp with a scalpel, and used a little electrocautery device to scorch the bare end so it wouldn’t bleed. And he left the suture in place until it dissolved on its own, boy you ought to feel what a suture on the end of your uvula feels like!!
