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When Food Gets Stuck: What You Need to Know

Interviewer: It's time for another edition of "ER or Not" with emergency room physician Dr. Jeffrey Druck, where we help you figure out if it's a reason to go to the ER, head to an urgent care, see your provider, or handle it on your own.

Today's question: You're eating dinner, maybe you had a bit too big of a bite of steak, and suddenly it feels like something is stuck in your throat. Maybe you can still breathe, but it won't go down. Should you go to the ER or not?

Dr. Druck: This is something that we see not uncommonly in the emergency department. I think it's really important to try and differentiate between food stuck in your esophagus, which is the tube that leads down to your stomach, or food that's stuck in your trachea, which is your airway that leads to your lungs.

Is It Life-Threatening? Recognizing the Signs

Food that's stuck in your trachea is life-threatening. Usually, that's when people start turning red in the face, and someone needs to do the Heimlich maneuver for them. That's trying to get the food out of your airway. And that is the kind of thing that there is no waiting for. That's the kind of thing where you call 911, have someone do the Heimlich, because those people are two to three minutes away from dying.

For people who feel like they have a piece of food stuck in their esophagus, there's no reason to do anything like the Heimlich at that point in time because that's not going to help move the food out of your esophagus. That maneuver is specifically to try and increase the amount of pressure pushing up in your trachea as opposed to doing anything from the esophageal perspective.

So usually these people who have something stuck in their esophagus, they're usually able to tell you exactly where it is. They're like, "Oh, it feels like it's stuck right in the middle," or, "It feels like it's stuck more over by my chest." They're able to define where it is.

And usually, they'll have symptoms that are like they can't swallow or anything, or when they try and swallow, it's exquisitely painful. Usually, people will come in with a cup where they're spitting all of their saliva into the cup because they can't swallow their saliva down.

What to Do at Home

Interviewer: If someone is experiencing that, is that an emergency or is that something . . . What should they be doing?

Dr. Druck: I would say that's something that needs to be taken care of urgently. There are a couple of things that you can do at home beforehand in an attempt to try and get it to pass.

One is trying to drink any sort of carbonated soda, like Coke or Sprite, or something like that. That's actually been shown to increase your chances of passing that food into your stomach by about 80%. Now, it's not great studies, but it's definitely something that you can try at home.

And then if that doesn't work, then definitely come on in to the emergency department because it is the kind of thing that can cause serious problems if it's not addressed relatively rapidly.

Usually, what happens when you come in is we try a couple of IV medications on you to see if we can help get that material to drop into your stomach. And if those don't work, then usually we call the gastroenterologist, and they come in with a scope and they push that material down physically.

The most common people that this happens to are people who are eating very rapidly and not chewing their food. And so I think that's probably the number one recommendation on how you can try and avoid something like this.

But on the flip side, there are some people who have problems with their esophagus. I don't know if you've heard of eosinophilic esophagitis or things like that, where people have underlying conditions that make their esophagus more likely to get food stuck in it. And that's the kind of thing that you want to have checked out by a gastroenterologist afterwards.

When It's Time to Go to the Emergency Room

Interviewer: So, final diagnosis, ER or not for food stuck in your throat?

Dr. Druck: If it's somebody who can't breathe, this is a 911 emergency. Pick up the telephone, call, and try to do a Heimlich maneuver on the person. If this is unable to swallow your own saliva, you can try the Coke trick at home, but otherwise, plan on coming to the emergency department.

And if it just feels like there's something there but you're able to swallow your own saliva, odds are that you probably just irritated your esophagus, and it's just going to take some time. Urgent care or your primary care doctor would be the right place to go.