Why does coughing hard hurt your throat so much if it’s just air coming out?
In: Biology
More or less by definition, if you’re coughing, it’s not just air coming out – coughing is your body attempting to get rid of something that shouldn’t be in your lungs. In practice, it’s often phlegm or water that you just forgot how to drink, and it’s in the part of your throat (the windpipe or trachea) that isn’t supposed to have anything but air in it. So, not only do you have the irritation of the foreign substance being in a place where your body really doesn’t want it, you are also forcefully pushing it back up the pipe, so those nerves are really not happy about it.
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