As the saying goes: people are iron, rice is steel, a meal is not hungry panic. But Master Jiang has often been threatened from eating and drinking in recent years, because he has a strange disease, whenever the onset, even a sip of water will make his throat around and the root of the ear painful, and even a move is afraid to move. After the pain was over, there was always a feeling like a lump in his throat. After several visits to the quintuplegia department, the problem was finally diagnosed as a rare form of glossopharyngeal neuralgia. He started taking a drug called carbamazepine to relieve the symptoms, but gradually the drug lost its effect, and increasing the dose of the drug led to drowsiness. Later, the doctor used local acupuncture followed by electricity, and the pain was controlled for some time. But recently relapsed again, in the words of Master Jiang, the pain is almost like dying in the past. Finally, I heard that the neurosurgery department of the First People’s Hospital of Changzhou City can cure this strange disease, although I heard that the surgery has certain risks, Master Jiang still did not hesitate to choose to open the surgery, hoping to be released from this painful life as soon as possible. The surgery went well, and the fearful pain disappeared immediately after the operation, so Master Jiang could finally drink and eat again with confidence and boldness. What is linguopharyngeal neuralgia? It occurs at the root of one side of the tongue, throat, tonsils, root of the ear and the back of the lower jaw, sometimes with pain at the root of the ear as the main manifestation. The main culprit of linguopharyngeal neuralgia is the blood vessels surrounding the nerve. These blood vessels supplying normal brain tissue can cause the above symptoms if they directly compress the nerve root, but of course there are also a few causes due to local tumor compression or inflammatory stimulation. Therefore, if you suspect that you are suffering from this disease, you need to undergo a special head MRI to find out if the culprit can be found and the tumor can be excluded at the same time. Once the diagnosis is clear, it can be treated conservatively first, and when conservative treatment does not work well the neurosurgeon can treat it with a surgical procedure called microvascular decompression. Since these nerve vessels are quite closely related to the brainstem, which is known as the center of life, the surgery is done under an operating microscope, where the surgeon carefully picks apart the vessels pressing on the nerve and separates them forever with a special material. Of course, sometimes several blood vessels are found to be related to the nerve, and only when the real “responsible vessel” is found will the surgery be effective, which requires the surgeon’s extensive experience.