The Swallowing Apparatus

Your swallowing apparatus is one of the most underestimated achievements of your body. More than two thousand times a day it executes a highly precise sequence: tongue, palate, pharyngeal muscles, epiglottis, esophageal musculature — everything interlocks with millisecond precision, so that what is meant to enter you actually reaches where it belongs. And so that what doesn't belong inside remains outside. It is a silent, tireless gatekeeper between you and the world.

Medically, the swallowing apparatus is a sequence of organs: oral cavity, pharynx, epiglottis, upper and lower esophageal sphincters, the smooth musculature of the esophagus. When something there is off — constriction, irritation, tension, reflux, a diffuse sensation of a foreign body, an uncertainty in the swallowing itself — that is first of all a matter for medicine.