It’s not actually stuck, and you can’t do anything to relieve the feeling except wait.
In: Biology
Your pill can actually get stuck in your throat. Not indefinitely, it will eventually be pushed down, but the feeling is uncomfortable.
This mostly happens when you take a pill without chasing it with water. Your esophagus is made to pass bite sized blobs of food. It has muscles that stretch and contract to allow blobs that size to pass comfortably. When you swallow a much smaller pill, sometimes those muscles can’t efficiently push it down towards your stomach, and you have to rely on gravity to help the pill down.
If the pill is not coated, you have the additional effect of it sticking to the wall of your esophagus. It’s meant to be moist at all times, again to help pass food, but a dry powdery pill can get stuck by the moisture. For some pills it can be problematic if it immediately starts to dissolve in the esophagus.
The easiest way to avoid it is to chase the pill with some water. It gets the pill unstuck from the walls of the esophagus and helps the muscles do their proper job of getting the pill down.
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