Let’s say you’re having lunch with a friend of yours, and when you take a bite of your sandwich and swallow, you start to cough uncontrollably. You manage to drink some water and get it under control and your friend explains to you that your sandwich “went down the wrong way”. What do they mean by this and what actually happens when this occurs?
In: Biology
If you look up the anatomy of the throat you will see there are two tubes, the trachea that leads to the lungs, and the esophagus that leads to the stomach. There is a mechanism to switch the track like a train depending on whether you are breathing or initiating swallowing.
When it “goes down the wrong tube” your brain mixed or confused the two, or you didn’t coordinate it properly, which causes water or food to go towards your lungs instead of your stomach.
Edit: in which case your body has a reaction to expel that from your lungs which causes you to cough.
Literally exactly that. The tube that goes from your mouth to your stomach and the tube that goes from your nose/mouth to your lungs are the same tube for the first bit. There’s a little flap of muscle called the epiglottis that’s supposed to close the hatch to your lungs while you eat so you don’t get food in your lungs. Alas, it doesn’t always do its job very well, and sometimes food goes down the lung pipe instead of the stomach pipe, and you have to cough to get the food out of your airway.
Remember kids: evolution doesn’t produce the *best* organisms, it produces the *good enoughest* organisms
Your throat splits into two paths – one path goes down to your stomach, the other goes down to your lungs. When you swallow, you have a flap called the epiglottis that blocks that path to your lungs – food and drink goes down into your stomach, and the path down to your lungs stays clear. Air goes one way, food goes another.
If you swallow weirdly, or if there’s a problem with that flap, a bit of your food might go down that windpipe – we call it *aspiration*. Your body *really* hates that happening, because food getting into your lungs can cause damage or infections like pneumonia. And of course, if a blockage is big enough, you can choke to death. So coughing is the body’s way of forcing that food back up towards your throat, so that it can reroute to your stomach, keeping your windpipe and your lungs clear.
Similar to this, sometimes when I swallow some food or drink, it’s like my throat wasn’t “ready” to swallow and it _hurts_ going down.
Definitely did not go down the wrong pipe, but _something_ odd happened.
In my mind I imagine that my esophagus is an elevator and somehow the food rawdogged it directly down the shaft, instead of waiting for the elevator to arrive.
Latest Answers