Sneezing is one of your body’s biological rejection mechanisms. The throat has the gag reflex, the digestive system has the butt, the eyes have blinking, and the respiratory system has sneezing. All serve the same function: To get rid of whatever the body doesn’t want inside of the body, as quickly as possible.
Your body sneezes out the dirt, dust, or germs that it doesn’t want. Do you want excess dirt, dust, and germs in your body? No, of course you don’t. That’s why you sneeze, and you allow your body to sneeze them out. There isn’t really a good reason to override the body’s natural, biological defense plan, unless you’re in, like, a quiet church during a funeral, a crowded elevator, or somewhere else where you don’t want to make a loud noise or spread germs. That’s very polite, but you could do real damage to yourself: Holding in a sneeze severely messed up a guy in England.
This sounds like an urban legend, but it’s real. The Associated Press picked up and spread a story first published this week in BMJ Case Reports, a medical journal. The sedate, medical article tells the tale of a 34-year-old man from Leicester, England, who went to the emergency room because he’d partially lost his voice, had difficulty swallowing, and, most alarmingly, felt a “popping sensation” in his neck, which was notably swollen. In the patient-doctor Q&A, the man said the problems really started when he forcefully held back a forceful sneeze. He stopped his body from doing what it needed to do by both closing his mouth and pinching his nose shut at the time of the sneeze.
Indeed, an X-ray reveled air pockets in his chest and neck (places where there shouldn’t really be air pockets), and a CT scan found that the pressure from the sneeze went inward instead of outward…and tore right through his throat’s soft, delicate tissue.
“When you sneeze, air comes out of you at about 150 miles per hour,” Dr. Anthony Aymat, director of ear, nose, and throat services at a London hospital, told the AP. “If you retain all that pressure, it could do a lot of damage and you could end up like the Michelin Man with air trapped in your body.”
The non-sneezer was kept in the hospital for a week, so he could be healed with antibiotics and fed with a feeding tube they snaked in through his mouth, bypassing his throat so it could heal.
So what should you do if you have to sneeze? Sneeze! But rather than let those germs fly…sneeze into a tissue or something, for crying out loud.
Here’s what people on Twitter thought of this man’s avoidable medical ordeal.