What's going on when a pill gets stuck in your throat? (Slight TMI)

Factual Questions
1

Yesterday I took a fish oil mini soft gel like I do every day. The damned thing got stuck in my throat. I chugged half a can of soda and it still wouldn’t go down.

Then I took a couple of my other pills and they went right down, past the fish oil gel.

Realizing sometimes it only feels like a pill is stuck when in fact it went down, I let it be. But 15 minutes later it still felt like it was there.


So stuck my finger down my throat an gagged myself. Soft gel popped right up out of my throat (not my stomach).

WTF!?! :confused:

Where was that thing? Why didn’t it go down after drinking 8 ounces of fluids? How did the other pills go down past it?

2

I find that softgels can be sticky sometimes? Maybe it was actually adhering?

3

Yeah softgels get really sticky when it hot out , I kept my in fridge in the summer.

4

it’s a good theory, except I usually get them good and lubed up with saliva before swallowing. Also, this has happened before with other types of pills. It’s weird.

5

I have a friend who had difficulties swallowing pills. He can swallow White Castle sliders in two bites but pills get stuck to the back of his throat. I recommended that he take a small (1/2 shot glass) drink of water but not swallow it. Tilt his head back. Drop the pills into the water in his mouth, and swallow the pills and water together. He no longer has a problem swallowing pills. No bitter after tastes, either.

I learned that trick while I was on an extended hospital stay. Take a pill, sip of water, take another pill, another sip of water, etc., etc., etc… Twice a day. To heck with that. Put all the pills in one cup, take a mouthful of water, pour the all the pills into the water, and swallow. ymmv.

6

Actually it’s better to tilt your head forward, with water in your mouth for pills that float, then swallow. That way the water is behind the pill as you swallow.

7

The water surrounds the pills. One gulp and they’re gone.

8

I’ve swallowed a zillion pills in my life. I don’t need a lesson on how to do it!

But like everyone else one occasionally gets “stuck”. The question is, what is going on when one gets stuck? Where is it? How are other pills going past it.

9

How big are the pills? Could it have gotten stuck in a cavity in or around your tonsils?

10

If other pills (or food) are going down and the first pill is stuck, I’d look into the possibility of a Zenker’s diverticulum.

Basically, a small pouch in the back of your esophagus that can collect food (or pills) and make it feel like there’s something stuck. Eventually it clears itself. It can be diagnosed via a barium swallow or endoscopy and there’s a surgery for it, but I’d suggest not watching it on youtube if you’re squirmish.

Also, something else to consider. When I was having a lot of problems with food and pills getting stuck in my throat, to the point that I had to go in and have my esophagus dilated sometimes I would ‘feel’ like something was stuck even though it wasn’t. The first bite of food would feel like it would get stuck, everything else would go down fine and hours later that first bite would finally clear. That’s how I learned about Zenker’s Diverticulum. However, when something actually was stuck, no other food or drink would go past it. Drinking, say, water, just caused the water to ‘back up’ into my mouth. The only way to fix it was to, um, make the stuck food/pills come back up. So it’s possible that some of these times it really does just feel like something is stuck when there’s actually nothing there, maybe some inflammation. I wonder if my two issues were related though.

11

Not a direct answer, but I also have similar issues, and the little video clip on the wiki article for Zenker’s Diverticulum (which is fascinating) certainly looks how I feel things are happening in my throat.

I find that if a thing gets stuck, there is a spot that I can press near the base of my throat, just under where I feel the blockage. Press that, swallow, the blockage goes down.

12

Sorry, no answer, just sympathy. For me it’s like there’s a little pocket that pills get stuck in. One time a big fish oil capsule got really stuck and I started retching and ended up retching up the torn open capsule. Great way to start my 52nd birthday! Now I use fish oil “pearls”. Even if they don’t go down on the first gulp I can chase them down pretty easily.

13

Rereading the OP, if it was a gel cap and it’s never happened before (with food or water), I’ll put in my vote for it just getting stuck to the side of your esophagus. At least with something like that, you could probably just slowly drink some water over a half hour or so and dissolve it so it finally breaks up and melts. If it starts happening more often, then it’s time to see a GI doc and look into getting an endo or doing a barium swallow, but until then I wouldn’t give it a second thought.

14

I can no longer swallow the “horse pill”-sized tablets. caplets, or capsules.

Smaller pills go down just fine, but the X-Large (vitamins, notably) get stuck and I have expel them, crush them and then swallow the bits.

Luckily, the vitamins now come in gel form.

Aging is not for the weak or un-resourceful.

15

If you are not on a liquid diet, then you can swallow a bite of food … so you can swallow any such tablet… Mind over matter…

16

Absolutely 100% not true and I left a doctor over that exact statement. I used to be able to swallow giant horse pills. Those big herbal supplement pills…I could swallow 3 or 4 of them at a time, no big deal. Eventually it got to the point that anything bigger than a Tylenol Caplet would get lodged in my throat.
I asked my ENT about it, he sent me for a barium swallow and it came back totally normal. At my next appointment (after the barium swallow) I said ‘so, what’s next’ and he said ‘nothing, you’re fine’. I tried to explain to him that I’m NOT fine, things are getting stuck in my food, it’s a problem for me. He said ‘well, you can eat right, you don’t choke on hamburgers or chicken or mashed potatoes, it’s all in your head’ at which point I told him that chicken actually does get stuck in my throat quite a bit (and pasta does as well and a few other things were culprits, beyond that I never really knew when it was going to happen), his reply to that was ‘it’s the way god made you, some people can’t play music, some people aren’t good at math, you don’t swallow food well, you just have to make sure you chew every bite really well, the barium swallow came back fine, we checked you out with the laryngoscope and that looked fine, everything is fine, it’s in your head blah blah blah’

So I found a GI doc and they suggested an endoscopy with dilation. I went in for that and afterwards, when they woke me up they told me my esophagus was so narrow they couldn’t even get the scope down. I’d have to come back a few weeks later when they could rent a pediatric scope from Children’s Hospital. When I came back for that one of the nurses commented on how tiny the scope was. They dilated me and made me come back a third time for another dilation because they can only stretch it so far each time (I think that’s normal).

Whenever someone says ‘you can swallow pills, it’s all in your head’, that’s the earful they get. Don’t get me wrong, if you try to swallow a pill and after you drink the water the pill is still in your mouth or you can cough it right back up, that’s one thing. But if it’s lodged in your throat, that’s different, that’s not in your head. You can’t mentally make it get stuck a few inches past your throat, you don’t have conscious control over those muscles.

Also, unless you eat rocks for lunch, keep in mind that food is soft and can conform to your throat and esophagus to help itself slide down, pills don’t do that. That’s why a person that gets an Excedrin stuck in their throat can still swallow a giant bite of hamburger with no problem.

17

When I was a kid I used to have to take gel-pills for something or other. Every once and a while one would get stuck as the OP describes. But then five minutes later, it would actually dissolve in my throat and I’d end up coughing up a bunch of gross-tasting powder.

Never had the same problem with any other med, so not sure what the malfunction was. It was an unpleasent enough sensation when it happened though, that I still kinda shudder when I recall it.

18

Not me, that I know of, anyway. I take three anti hypertensives, a statin, and plavix every morning. If I’m in a hurry I dry swallow them. Never an issue.

19

According to your published results, you do need help. And a zillion pills is a whole lot of pills. I guess congratulations must be in order???

Maybe you suffer from xerostomia?

20

Bwaahahahahaha! :p:p:p:p:p

ROFLMAO!

It’s so much the opposite you wouldn’t believe it. I had the same dentist for 30 years and he told me he had never, ever had a patient with as much saliva as me!

My wife compares me to the aliens on the Simpsons.

I did have my esophagus dilated some years ago. But the problem then was down at the opening of my stomach not at the top.

Every now and then a pill just sits in my throat and won’t go down while other things will past it. I will discuss that sac thing with a GI doctor. Thanks for the posts, folks. :slight_smile: