Man learns if you have to sneeze, just let it out

Sneezing is an astoundingly powerful human action, blasting mucus and air from the nose and mouth at up to 100 miles per hour, according to the Cleveland Clinic. 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 urging people to sneeze freely and not to hold back.

A man in the United Kingdom 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 it tore through the soft tissue in his throat, rupturing part of it.

The study said the man one day felt a sneeze forming and, feeling sneezes are unhygienic, tried to stop it. He clamped one hand over his mouth while pinching his nose. Then, he felt a “popping sensation” in his neck, which began to swell.

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.

Doctors hospitalized the man, who was given a feeding tube and put on a regimen of antibiotics. He was released a week later.

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.

“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.”