Home Remedies and Laryngeal Anatomy

I recently found myself in the position of a) losing my voice, and b) needing my voice to make it through teaching three discussion sections.

I promptly stocked up on slippery elm lozenges, swore off all dairy, drank copious amounts of honey and lemon in my tea, gargled salt water, and attempted to get a good night's sleep (my stepsister has been a professional singer at various points in time, and I learned a few tricks from her when we were younger). The results were minimally sufficient.

I also did a little googling in case there was something I was forgetting, and was amazed at the ridiculous explanations I saw for why these techniques worked. This is, of course, symptomatic of the fact that home remedies are of course not subject to any sort of scientific or medical review. Still, I was amazed.

One of the main myths I saw that totally shocked me was the idea that when consuming things like lozenges and honey, one is actually coating one's vocal folds with those substances. I don't know how you suck on your lozenges or drink your tea, but in the course of normal swallowing these things should not be getting friendly with the vocal folds. Such forwardness on the part of your lozenge should in fact be greeted with a sudden forceful cough, similar to what happens when liquid "goes down the wrong pipe." This helps keep you from dying.

I guess I'm just surprised that most people don't have an intuitive sense that the part of their throat that vibrates when they talk is connected to their lungs and not their stomach. Then again, most people don't have a life-long obsession with speech sounds, so perhaps my surprise is unwarranted.