What to do if you have difficulty swallowing and choking on water after a stroke

  With the onset of winter, the incidence of stroke disease is gradually increasing. Many people have difficulty swallowing, choking and coughing after a stroke, and in severe cases, they can only rely on nasal feeding to maintain nutrition, but most people have difficulty accepting nasal feeding, mainly because they are not only physically uncomfortable but also psychologically under great pressure, feeling that they do not even have the ability to eat, like an invalid. Family members are in pain, but they can’t do anything about it and don’t know how to help the patient. So let’s first understand the disease.  Pseudomyelitis is a common complication of cerebrovascular disease; it is not a disease, exactly, but a group of symptoms. Pseudomyelitis is characterized by three main symptoms: dysphagia, dysarthria, and affective disorders. Dysphagia is primarily a difficulty in eating, slow eating, and choking on food. In the early stages of the disease or in milder cases it may not be very difficult to swallow, but the patient becomes slower to drink and occasionally chokes and coughs, at which time the family should pay attention to it. Because if the food choked into the trachea, may cause aspiration pneumonia, or food is larger, causing asphyxiation, life-threatening, such cases in the clinic is also quite a few. Dysarthria, the main manifestation is the inability to speak, or spit out words, and in mild cases there may be hoarseness. Patients may be able to understand the meaning of the people around them, but can only make slurred sounds, it is difficult to communicate with others, and the patient is very likely to produce anxiety. Emotional disorders, indifferent expressions, dementia, strong crying and laughing, etc. Some of these are due to brain lesions, while others are secondary to the pain of the disease.  After understanding the disease, the most important concern should be how to treat it. There is nothing too good for the disease in Western medicine, and the Chinese medicine plays its characteristic. The best time for treatment is within three months, and more than one year is not completely untreatable, but the speed of recovery and prognosis will be much worse.  Patients should also be given health guidance. Strengthen the patient’s understanding of the disease, relieve the patient’s psychological pressure; instruct the patient to eat correctly, need to be in a quiet environment, eat viscous paste food, eat when the patient is conscious, the temperature and size of the food is appropriate, each time to swallow the food completely, if the patient can not eat need to ensure adequate nutritional intake of the patient through intestinal feeding.