Jolting awake coughing and spluttering, with a sour or bitter fluid at the back of your throat and a desperate need to clear your airway — it’s a horrible way to wake up, and it frightened me the first few times it happened. What you’re experiencing is usually aspiration: …
Waking Up Choking From Acid Reflux (Aspiration Explained) Read More
If you wake at night gasping or choking, it’s natural to want a name for what just happened. Two very different conditions are the usual suspects: reflux-triggered laryngospasm and obstructive sleep apnea. From the inside they can feel almost identical — a sudden, terrifying fight for air — yet …
Few things reflux does are as frightening as this: you’re fast asleep, and then suddenly you’re bolt upright, throat clamped shut, unable to pull in any air. It might last only seconds, but in the moment it feels like you’re suffocating. If that’s happened to you, I want to …
Laryngospasm & Silent Reflux: Why You Wake Up Gasping Read More
One question puzzled me for years with silent reflux: why is the throat so much more delicate than the food pipe below it? People with ordinary heartburn can have acid splashing their oesophagus (the tube that carries food to the stomach) for years before it causes real trouble. Yet …
If you’ve been down the reflux rabbit hole, you’ve probably come across prokinetics — a class of drugs that speed up the movement of your digestive tract. The logic sounds compelling: empty the stomach faster and tighten the valve above it, and there should be less acid to reflux …
Most reflux advice fixates on the valve at the top of the stomach — and it matters. But there is a second half of the story that gets almost no attention: how quickly your esophagus cleans up after acid comes back up. That job belongs to esophageal motility, the …