- Sneezing is an astoundingly powerful human action, blasting mucus and air from the nose and mouth at up to 100 miles per hour...That power exists whether a sneeze is held in or not.
- “Occasionally, people will cause some damage to their eardrums or their sinuses if they stifle a very violent sneeze,” Rachel Szekely, an immunologist at Cleveland Clinic, said in an article on the health provider’s website urging people to sneeze freely and not hold back.
- A healthy 34-year-old man living in the United Kingdom has learned that the hard way, according to a case study published Monday in the British Medical Journal. His attempt to stifle a sneeze backfired, and the force of that would-be sneeze tore through the soft tissue in his throat, rupturing part of it.
- One day he felt a sneeze forming and did what he often did: tried to stop it. He clamped one hand over his mouth while pinching his nose.
- While trying to hold back the sneeze, he felt a “popping sensation” in his neck, which began to swell. His voice also changed.
- Subsequent X-rays showed that the built-up pressure from the sneeze, which needed to escape his body somehow, tore through the throat’s soft tissue when its preferred exit — his nose and mouth — were blocked. It ruptured the pharynx, the membrane-filled cavity connecting the mouth and nose with the esophagus. It also caused air bubbles to form in his neck’s soft tissue, which caused the popping sensation.
- Fearing that a deep neck infection could form, doctors hospitalized the man, who was given a feeding tube and put on a regimen of antibiotics. He was released a week later, after the wounds in his neck healed.
- Sneezing is the body’s way of ridding itself of potentially harmful irritants in the nose, throat or lungs. Pressure builds up in the lungs and then forcefully explodes up the esophagus and out of the nose and mouth. But if those orifices are blocked, the pressure needs to escape somehow
- “I’ve seen patients with a ruptured eardrum or pulled back muscles, and you hear about cracked ribs,” [an otolaryngologist] told Time in 2015.
- “By stifling a sneeze, you could push infected mucus through the eustachian tube and back into the middle ear,” Szekely said in the Cleveland Clinic article. “You can get middle ear infections because of that.
Read the popular press article (by Travis M. Andrews)
here and the case study
here.
