You are in a public place, a classroom, the hall of a shopping center or a bar, and suddenly someone falls next to you with seizures, the product of an epilepsy attack or some similar evil, and not someone who shouts, with an expert tone, will be missing: “Put something in your mouth so that you don't swallow your tongue!”.
Many of us have experienced a similar situation and we all felt that the advice made sense.Well no, and in Science Daily Online we will explain why.
Could you really swallow your tongue?
The truth is that it is completely contraindicated to put an object in a person's mouth when he is convulsing, because in this way you can cause internal wounds, break a tooth or obstruct the airways, and there is really no way for the victim to swallow his tongue, because such a thing does not it is physically possible .
The tongue is an organ that involves muscles, bone structures (despite if nicknamed as the "boneless"), nerve endings, taste buds and salivary glands, attached to the floor of the mouth by the frenulum of the tongue ( frenulum linguae ), a mucous membrane that runs from the gum to the base of the tongue, and that among other functions is responsible for keeping the tongue in a suitable position, regardless of what the rest of the body is doing.
On both sides of the frenulum are the Wharton ducts and a little further behind the Bartolini ducts, saliva holes of the salivary glands. Sometimes this piece that gives stability to the tongue is very short and causes problems: it makes it difficult for children to breastfeeding, speech learning and the pronunciation of some sounds, producing the phenomenon known in Latin America as "rag language" or "mocha language".
In these cases, when the tongue is very close to the floor of the mouth by a short lingual frenulum, it is spoken of ankyloglossia, and it is possible to solve it with a small surgical intervention , known as Phrenotomy, or in less severe cases, with speech therapy.
Returning to the initial topic, do you still think you could swallow your tongue? Maybe if, as long as it is the language of others, your girlfriend or boyfriend; or it could be yours, if you were an informer discovered by drug traffickers.They would make you swallow your tongue, or they would tie it to you.Terrible, but in any other way it is impossible .
We recommend you read these curious facts about the language so you have more idea of what we are talking about.
Images: eltpics, Evan Long
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