What this is, and what it isn’t

The idea

Some swallowing conditions are easy to look up once you know their names. The hard part is the name. If you have never been told the word, you can only search for what it feels like, and searches for “can’t burp” or “food sticks in my throat” lead in a dozen directions.

Free the Burp starts from the other end. It begins with the words people use before they know the medical ones, and connects them to five conditions that all involve a muscle in the swallowing tract that does not open or squeeze the way it should. For each one it gives the name, how it differs from the conditions next to it, and the test to ask a doctor for by name.

What it will not do

• It does not diagnose. It cannot tell you what you have. Several of these conditions can only be told apart with a test, and many of the symptoms here have other causes.
• It is not a doctor directory. For R-CPD, the community site noburp.info already keeps a directory of clinicians who treat it, built over years. Use that.
• Phrase choices stay in your browser. They disappear when you leave the page. If you separately sign up for study alerts, we store your email, alert preferences and followed studies with your consent. Read about alert data and deletion.

How the facts were checked

Every factual sentence on a condition page links to its source: a clinical guideline, a systematic review, a study, or Laryngopedia, the reference site run by the laryngologist who named R-CPD. If a sentence could not be traced to a source, it was cut. The site checks that each citation has a source entry. That check does not establish that a source supports every claim.

The everyday phrases come from published patient surveys and interview studies, and from patient pages written by clinicians. No post from any forum was copied and no person is quoted. Each phrase in the site’s vocabulary file carries the source that shows people describe it that way.

The paper counts and diagnosis times are explained, with their limits, on the evidence page. The trials list is pulled from ClinicalTrials.gov. Automatically refreshed descriptions use the registry’s own words and may include technical terms.

Independent clinical review has not been verified. This is a student research project, not a clinical service.

Information here was last checked in October 2026. Medicine changes. If something looks out of date, a doctor’s advice comes first.