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[Click here for an update from Probaway for coughs related to Covid.]

Inhaling food or liquids can be very annoying and dangerous and it’s a good idea to learn this coughing technique for when you just happen to have a serious problem. Most of the time people just cough when they have gotten something down their windpipe and it clears immediately. It is very serious when people inhale a chunk of food which gets stuck in their windpipe and that requires another person to do the Heimlich maneuver to clear it out, or they die of suffocation. But, what I am proposing here isn’t for that type of instantly life threatening problem. Rather, it’s for a slower type of also life threatening problem, that of having stuff down into your lungs and not coming out which can cause an infection, which might turn deadly. This technique is for clearing small pieces of material or liquids that have gone so deep into the windpipe or even into the lungs that they refuse to come out with an ordinary cough. Basically this is a method for vibrating the windpipe to loosen bits of material stuck there. It’s different than an ordinary cough which is a compressed bolus of air being rapidly expelled and creating a forceful wind which usually dislodges and expels the offending stuff. This proposed technique is a more continuous shaking than a cough.

When you get something in your lungs try this. Stand up and place your feet wide apart, then lean forward to where your body is in as far over toward a horizontal position as you can easily do. It helps to place your palms on the top of your knee caps to support yourself in this position. Then slowly take a deep breath and exhale it quickly, in about one second, which is about as fast as the air will go out. While doing this, close off the upper part of your throat like you are going to cough, or even do a slight cough to get the vibration started. The goal is to create a deep vibrating sound with your deep throat. The sound is created by the vibrating of the deeper tissues far down your throat near your lungs. It is about 15 vibrations per second which is a little faster than the fastest you can vibrate your hand back and forth. Try doing this with your chin well up, then move it to a closer to the chest position and you should be able to find a place where this deep vibration occurs. It will take a little experimental practice to find your own position and tone. Breathe in slowly between these vibrating exhalations taking over five seconds and when you get dizzy from breathing too much take a half minute break.

The goal of the procedure is to shake loose anything that is deep in your windpipe with the vibrations and then to expel it with the wind. This procedure seems to get down to deeper things than just a standard cough. The horizontal posture keeps anything which is dislodged from falling back into the lungs. Also, in my particular body it is easier to get the vibrating tone in the horizontal posture.

Listen to some soothing Throat Chakra Meditations but none of these is quite what I have in mind because as deep and vibrating  as these Tibetan inspired notes are they aren’t the deep vibrating you can get with the above noted procedure. That vibration isn’t so much in the throat as in the lungs. It isn’t really a note so much as a shaking of the trachea. It will take a movie to demonstrate and a neologism to keep it separate from Tibetan throat singing and  a separate term to disambiguate the technique. The new word could be something like trakeshake, a fusion of the words trachea and shake. Perhaps it sounds too much like Shake n Bake which is probably a trademarked name. There may already be an existing word for this but I haven’t found it. There is a similar physical response and term for a horse curling its lip and making a particular sound. That’s called flehmen and is sometimes called a horse laugh. The hacking cough is a little different because although it is a deep cough it is a single shake. The deep trakeshake is unique and takes a lungfull of air and vibrates the trachea several times.

Clear inhaled food with a hurling-hacking cough called a trakeshake.