Neck /throat tightness and pressure

Check out celebellar tonsillar ectopia or Chiari 1 Malformation. First symptoms is headaches and neck pain and reg flag symptom is difficulty swallowing/choking

Your symptoms are exactly what I feel. Have you got any answers yet?

Im having all the same symptoms as you all and I don't have a clue and besides all the throat issues I'm having the chicken wing pain left in my back going to get an ultrasound and see an ENT wish me luck

Sounds just like me! It's driving me insane!! Did u ever get relief or any answers??? Please share

I've got pressure in left side on neck back of neck and back of head. I'm only 16 and my doctor said its muscularskelatal pain.
It's not pain though

Yes, me also like someone is digging their heel in my neck at the base of my skull like the pressure on my throat also

I too had preassure on my carotid arteries in my neck. Once with stabbing pain and I felt like I was going to have a stroke. It wasn't until I was diagnosed with a autoimmune disease (vasculitis) and started methotrexate did these symptoms disappear. My doctors were baffled and the inflammation had traveled to my heart so I suspect the stabbing symptoms in the arteries in my throat were artery spasms. This is a tough symptom to diagnose it could be a thousand things and doctors are a nightmare if you have poor mans insurance. Good luck.

Mine was an inflammatory disease.

I have had tightness on the left side of my neck from the bottom /side of my ear following my jaw line. It does move around to the front of my throat and to the right side but predominately the left. I thought I may have tightened up when had my ear irrigated for wax but it's been 4 weeks. had ultrasound on neck and found nothing. Some doctor said try advil (does work for awhile) prednisone, claritin none of which I tried. Going to another doctor tomorrow. It is best in the morning and I don't notice it when laying down at night. had an ultrasound a few years ago on my thyroid and it's fine. No pain or headache just tightness. Feels like a lump in my neck but doc said my neck is so skinny he could feel the back of my spine! Really bugging me. I think I remember having something similar to this about three years ago.

Check out the symptoms of Giant Cell Arteritis.
This is a possible cause

i have had this feeling of being choked, pain on left side of head and back of neck for over 3 months. i have had ct scans, barium swallow, mri of brain,mri of head and neck. only showed tyroid nodules and epiglottis cyst. doctors said they were not the cause.the pain has never gone away, and it hurts to swallow pills so i have taken liquid hydroconone, percoset . does no good. i want to die

Well I found this site after dealing with the throat tightness, difficulty swallowing, and I have voice changes-my voice sounds "squeezed" a lot, and also goes very hoarse. I am a professional singer and this has gone on for about 5 months. I am desperate. I WAS much worse at first-as though I had something stuck in my vocal cords! I literally could barely croak out sounds. I developed a severe illness-pericarditis- (inflammation of the heart sac,which causes fluid around the heart, severe pain, shortness of breath etc) I was literally unable to leave the sofa for 18 motnhs. I cut all gluten and began to get better. I was also switched to a new medicine for my rheumatoid arhtrits-it is a sulfa drug, and not long after, this throat thing started. I just wanted to say, many many people on my pericarditis support group have the lump in throat thing, neck pain in the back of the neck (mine is on right side in back of neck) so I am unsure whether this has to do with the heart issues. I am 90% better-pericarditis won't kill you, but makes you sick as hell for a long time.( Its also very rare, mostly in people with autoimmune diseases) I wanted to mention this just to give you all another avenue to explore. During all my testing (at Cleveland Clinic, so a good hospital) they found a thryroid nodule too, on the right side, which happens to be where the worst of my symptoms are. They did a biopsy and it came back "indeterminate" so they sent it for genetic cancer testing, and it is benign.So I started looking elsewhere, The throat stuff started right after the sulfa drug, so I cut it way back and it did get better. I am about to go to the dr soon and want to ask for a new medicine to see if the sulfa is doing it. I can barely do my job as a singer, and am at my wits end, not to mention how awful the throat stuff feels! A thyroid nodule also can make you "feel" a lump though, from all my research. It does feel like an allergy though, I have to say-I never had more than slight hay fever all my life-and now since this major illness, I have a lot of problems. it makes me think MAYBE some infection is the cause of the pericarditis and everything else...I had an intestinal abcess 4 years ago, and they asked me atcleveland if I'd ever had anything like that. Apparently, that kind of infection can go to the heart, or other body systems. When the poster above talked about taking an old antibiotic she had laying aorund and then felt better immediately, it makes me wonder. So, keep searching for your issues-make them give you a round of antibiotics, just in case-wont hurt you and might help, at least you'd know.also take the PPI's or Pepcid type stomach pills to see if that's it./ I think a LOT of us have different things wrong thatcan affect and cause the same symptoms.Good luck to you all.

Just throwing my two pennies in. Five weeks ago I was laid up in hospital for a week with acute epiglottitis. While there, I couldn't talk, eat, or even swallow saliva properly, so they kept me alive with IVs for the week. The problem here is that for that week I had nothing in my stomach. I was being fed paracetamol through an IV for the pain -refused tramadol and morphine because I'm not a big fan of feeling out of it, these days- and, on top of steroid injections to keep the swelling from getting to extreme, was being given liquid ibuprofen orally to help with the inflammation. I'm not ignorant to the damage NSAIDs can and will do to your stomach -ESPECIALLY with no food inside it- but the pain was that horrendous that, at the time, I didn't care. For the first few nights in hospital I had the worst acid reflux I've ever experienced. I get acid reflux often enough that I keep a box of Rennies within arms reach of my bed, anyway, but this was much worse as, obviously, my throat was pretty knackered anyway. Anyway, what's being described -the feeling of a noose around the neck, the lump in the throat, the tight throat muscles, neck, head and ear ache, hard mucus at the back of the tongue etc.- is exactly what I'm feeling five weeks on. I went back to the hospital a few days ago because, after my week of oral antibiotics after leaving the hospital had finished, the feeling in my throat changed and then got steadily worse. My fear was that the infection hadn't been killed off and the epiglottitis was coming back. The first time around, I called an ambulance perhaps twelve hours after I felt the symptoms coming on -this was the point where my voice changed and the swelling in my throat went from worrying to an obvious issue- and was told that if I'd gone to bed I'd have died before morning, so naturally when I started feeling swelling in my throat I didn't mess around. First they had me see a general practitioner, who agreed with me that I had an infection in my throat. I insisted on seeing an ENT doctor on the spot -who knew more about epiglottitis than the hospital GP and told him to send me up to ENT- and was scoped, revealing mucus at the base of the tongue just above the epiglottis, and some general inflammation in the area. They prescribed me two antibiotics -phenoxymethylpenicillin and metronidazole- yet when I asked to see my blood results my white cell count was normal and no infection was found in my blood. I'm taking the course of antibiotics, anyway, to ease my mind, but I'm fairly convinced -after a LOT of reading over the last several days- that what's happening is that my throat was particularly inflamed from the initial bad bouts of acid reflux while I was in hospital, I likely am experiencing silent reflux now (was on ibuprofen and aspirin for a month after leaving the hospital - I don't even want to know what all of those NSAIDs have done to my stomach) and it's being worsened by anxiety. I'm an anxious person anyway and acquainted enough with panic attacks that they feel like an unwanted yet familiar friend to me, and I'm no stranger to being poked and prodded by the sympathetic nervous system to accommodate my anxieties, but this is a new one to me. I suppose I just wanted to thank all of you. Over the last week or so, the only thing that has kept me from calling an ambulance and, many times, reduced the feeling of having swallowed a golf ball, is reading the comments on this page and others like it. Also as someone who'd lived with anxiety and panic attacks for perhaps fifteen years, I recognise a lot of these comments as anxiety related -it would be fair to say the majority. The throat is a strange area; you don't mess with it. I think when something like GERD or LPR cause an actual symptom, our natural anxieties and that pesky sympathetic nervous system have a habit of taking over and the problem becomes self-perpetuating. Anxiety might seem like an unsatisfying answer to many of you, but take it from me, you would be surprised what anxiety can do to the body. People make the mistake of thinking it's a mental thing: it isn't, it's VERY much physical, and can and will mimic the physical symptoms of a real illness.

For those I've worried about epiglottitis, just a few things. If you have no pain with your lump, no fever, and you aren't speaking like Barry White, you're probably fine. With epiglottitis -for me, at least- it feels as though there's a finger digging into your throat and reaching behind the adam's apple, the lump ranges from the middle of the throat to the back of the throat (though you can't see it if you look in your mouth) your voice will change in a way that is impossible not to notice (I can't even recreate it if I try) and the lump in your throat will NOT go away or feel less severe when you eat food. You're also very likely to have a fever and when you swallow water, half of it ends up in your sinuses or back in your mouth. It comes on over the space of several hours, then becomes much worse very quickly. If the above applies to you, get yourself to the ER and don't take any chances. Don't worry unnecessarily, though. Epiglottitis is very rare. What calms me down when I feel like it might be coming back is to eat something -usually with hot tea- and the fact that the muscles seem to correct themselves momentarily while I'm eating -a telltale sign of globus- is usually enough to steer my mind back in the right direction and reassure me that I'm not going to end up back in a hospital bed.

I'll try to remember to update this if and when it goes. If I normalise when my anxiety goes down, maybe I can return the favour and reassure a few others with the same symptoms. I will note that, since I started reading about GERD, LPR, globus etc it's gradually improved a little with each day (comes on a little later in the afternoon than the day before -some of you no doubt know exactly what I'm talking about- and with less severity). Many of you will know this condition far better than I do, but one thing I know about anxiety and its psychosomatic manifestations is that if you expect to feel a certain way -even (or especially) subconsciously: you will.

Best of luck to all of you, anyway. Cheers.

I have the same feeling as the above guest has. I have had this for 3 years and it is happening more frequently. Am going to Dr. today and will get checked for Hashimotos thyroid disease.
Thanks for the info.

When i had the vascular ultrasound, i realized that rope around my neck is caused by cartoid vein. It is serious. Have a vascular ultrasound ASAP from an ENT doctor.