What causes Clicking or Popping in Throat when Swallowing?

Hi @kmd01, have you managed a swallowing disorder with a speech-language pathologist, education and training? How are you doing now?

Hi Colleen,
I have had minor issues in the past but currently nothing, such as the individual whom I provided the comment for based on the link I provided. I appreciate your response.

Three days ago I went to a chiropractor to have my neck adjusted. He gave me two exercises to do because I was getting mild headaches behind my eyes from the adjustment. The one exercise showed me how to put my right hand over the back of my head and gently pull my head close to my arm pit to stretch the muscles in my neck. I did this exercise three times with 20 second intervals. The next day when I swallowed saliva, water, food I had this loud popping noise every time! I put my finger under my chin and slightly to the right and felt the pop noise push out of this area. The popping noise has subsided a little bit; but the oddest part of all of it is that if I very slightly move my head to the left, there is no popping noise when I drink or swallow food. This feeling is so extremely frustrating to me. I never know when it's going to pop again. Needless to say, I stopped the neck exercises. I think I may have pull down on my neck too much.

TLDR: I had the popping issue due to silent reflux. From time to time tissue around the vocal cord swells and I will have this issue until I get the GERD under control. My GERD is due to having too LITTLE stomach acid.

Long version:

So I read this thread in a panic when I got my popping issue. In my case it's been on and off for years, usually it lasts less than several hours, but yesterday I had a case where it wouldn't go away and I had to go to sleep with it, which alarmed me. Today however, I woke up with the issue being gone, to my relief. I want to share what I think I learned about the condition here anyways.

I think I've been able to retrace all the factors that led to my on-and-off popping issue.

First of all, I have a thyroid nodule on the right side. It's benign and has been stable for years, people won't notice it unless they know it's there, but once you notice the bulge, it's actually quite large, in the order of some centimeters. This by itself didn't cause the popping, but I'm mentioning it here because it might be a factor.

Second, I have too LITTLE stomach acid. Now from what I learned, when the stomach is not acidic enough, some kind of valve which prevents the contents from going back up the esophagus doesn't work anymore, e.g. you get GERD. This type of reflux is especially hard to notice because it's not very acidic and doesn't hurt as much. I now take stomach acid (betaine HCL) pills with every meal and the GERD is less. Also I make sure to sleep elevated and on a mostly empty stomach.

So yesterday, after I ate, I took an unusually little amount of my stomach pills and also drank a lot with my meal. Then right afterwards, I went to the gym and did a bunch of ab crunches, more than my usual, thereby compressing my stomach repeatedly. All this resulted in GERD during the day, a hoarse voice as well as a painful irritation. I didn't get the popping issue immediately, but after some hours, in the evening, I must've done some kind of motion that caused things to get stuck into some misalignment - the popping problem started. It was also painful, like I had a mild throat infection, except it wasn't located in the back of my throat but deeper.

As I mentioned in the TLDR - I didn't eat anything else that day, went to sleep on an empty stomach and took an antihistamine (to decrease inflammation) and magnesium (to help my muscles relax, since I did fitness that day). The problems were all gone when I woke up. No popping, no pain.

Needless to say I am now extra careful to manage my GERD and not touch/move my neck needlessly.