Having seen three rare cases of hiccups due to heart attacks, and intractable cases unresponsive to the usual home cures or metoclopromide, I found this article interesting.
How do your stop hiccups? What do you advise other people to do?
Paywalled.
Sorry, here is a brief excerpt (from above link):
Seifi believes that each of the remedies ultimately works by generating the required pressure in the diaphragm… He wanted to make something that could consistently generate 100 centimeters of water pressure in the diaphragm, which he deemed the effective threshold to stop hiccups in adults.
His solution was based on what physicists call Bernoulli’s Principle. “Imagine you have a water hose and you open the faucet,” Seifi says. “If you put half your thumb in front of the hose, the flow stays the same, but by changing the diameter the speed of the fluid changes; it ejects more.”
Seifi designed a special kind of straw that uses this principle in reverse. The bottom of the straw has a very small pinhole, while the drinking end has a fairly large one. To get any water through the straw, the user has to exert an unusually large amount of suction, which means generating pressure in the diaphragm. Seifi was able to calculate the required dimensions for… exerting exactly 100 centimeters of water pressure.
Seifi named his creation the HiccAway, and sold his first unit in 2020, priced at $13.42. He launched a Kickstarter campaign…. So far, that seems to be a sound investment. The HiccAway has now grossed more than $1 million. Yet Seifi’s straw is not the only hiccup cure. There is another reliable method, also backed by sound science… as free as the air you breathe.
Luc Morris is a surgeon at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, specializing in tumors of the head and neck. Almost 20 years ago, when he was a medical student at NYU, he wrote a [letter to the editor of a specialist medical journal in which he laid out a potential treatment for…. the hiccups. The name he gave to the new technique was “supra-supramaximal inspiration.”
SSMI, as the medical profession’s predilection for abbreviations has it, boils down to a simple breathing exercise. First, exhale completely, then inhale a deep breath. Wait 10 seconds, then—without exhaling—inhale a little more. Wait another five seconds, then top up the breath again. Finally, exhale. Generally, you will find that your… [hiccups are cured, providing you are physically able to follow the instructions].
Exhale completely. Hold breath. Allow body to do the “straining to breathe” reflexive motion as many times as you can handle. Take a single, deep, elaborate gasp for air once you can’t take anymore.
Works every time.
More fun to make people drink water from the wrong side of the glass.
A spoonful of sugar. Let it dissolve in the mouth.
Yes, and to make it even tastier, use brown sugar.
My sure-fire cure (it always works for me, at least):
Block your ears and drink as much water as you can at one time.
It’s a bit tricky if you’re doing it by yourself, but I’ve mastered the technique of blocking my ears with my thumbs while holding a water bottle or cup between my ring and pinkie fingers.
The deep breath works for me every time. Not always on the first time, but always by the third or fourth.
I am not a doctor, but I am a doctor’s son.
Many years ago I read in a reliable source (which I have forgotten) that the physiological basis to stop hiccups is to increase the CO2 level in your blood.
All the folk cures, including those mentioned here, are indirect actions that work by slowing or holding your breath. They all are equally effective. Plus there’s also the Placebo Effect.
My favorite is breathing slowly into a paper lunch bag. Hold the bag over your nose and mouth, and continue breathing slowly until the hiccups stop.
Most doctors think they are caused by a spasm of the muscle which separates the lungs and abdomen. Hence the logic of increasing pressures.
FWIW, my lovely wife swears by the HiccAway straw discussed at the top of the thread. She’d had bouts for years and tried every folk method she came across but says this one is the easiest for her and she reports a very high success rate when she does it.
This method has never failed to work for me. Been doing it for over 60 years.
For some reason, eating sandwiches (including hamburgers) quickly seems to bring on my hiccups. I’ve mentioned this to other people and they look at me like I’m crazy.
I absolutely have the cure. When anyone I know gets the hiccups, I look at them with concern and say, gesturing at my own nose, “is your nose bleeding a little bit?” They’ll typically check and find nothing, I follow up with, “well, are your hiccups gone?” It works EVERY SINGLE TIME. In fact, my guy had the hiccups last night and I started the process, he said, “I’m not falling for that again” and, I’m not kidding, his hiccups were gone. Try it!