I had a very similar experience with eosenophilic esophogitis (EoE). It's an allergic reaction that causes your esophagus to constrict resulting in acute dysphagia (difficulty swallowing). It can get extremely unpleasant for me as well as anyone around me when an attack happens. The problem is that the latency between eating the food that triggers it and actual symptoms is many many hours, and the symptoms only appear if you happen to swallow something that's just a little too big, and by then it's too late. It was only by sheer luck that I managed to figure out what my trigger is (scallops). In order to be diagnosed you have to get an endoscopy, which is also the only indicated treatment (other than avoiding the trigger food if you can figure out what it is).

I had this idea of using gel caps to get a better read on my internal state because you can feel them going down but they don't actually get stuck (and even if they do they dissolve pretty quickly and don't cause too much discomfort). The idea is to have them in a variety of sizes, and to start with small ones and get bigger until you can feel one. That gives you much more fine-grained data which you can then correlate with what you've eaten the day before. Trick is, I can't find a source of placebo gel caps in assorted sizes anywhere. I can't even find a manufacturer to make them for me. Every manufacturer I've approach about this insists on having some active ingredient, and they also want minimum orders in the thousands of units.

The irony is that I would have no problem getting these on the market as homeopathic remedies of some sort.