Heh, the one I had work every time (everybody has their own, dont’ they?) is kind of hard to accomplish, but you need to get a stranger in your face.
You heard that right.
You need to have a stranger walk up to you and stare you in the eyes about 2" or less between faces. That makes most people so profoundly uncomfortable that the hiccups stop. Don’t know why.
I’ve had chronic hiccups twice in my life, once very recently. In both cases, all of the home remedies (breath holding, sugar, being startled, and sipping water rapidly) didn’t help. I eventually had to go to the doctor, who prescribed Anaspaz. Hold a pill under your tongue till it dissolves, and the hiccups go away very soon.
I have, however, not tried drinking water from the opposite side.
For “common” cases, sugar usually works for me, but every few years…
I learned to stop hiccups in my teens by pressing in on my diaphram. You have to press with constant pressure, fairly hard, right at the triangle point above your stomach, but below your ribs. It worked better if I was lying down.
Eventually I learned to control my diaphram without pressing in - basically I could just “calm” it down by concentrating, somewhat in the same way you can force yourself not to sneeze sometimes. I wouldn’t have been able to learn how to do that without lots of practice pressing in first, though.
I’ve never been able to teach this to my wife - I think she can’t press in hard enough (it takes strong fingers to reach far enough to press on the diaphram).
One problem in judging the efficacy of any treatment for hiccups is the fact that they are of indeterminate duration to start with. Yes, your remedy may have stopped them but then again they may have subsided anyway had you done nothing. It is natural to think of the last thing you try as being a cure. This is how superstitions get started and IMO is the basis of at least one type of “talk therapy” that used to be widely used by psychologists. If you tell a friend of your treatment then it is more likely to be the last thing they tried and thus a particular remedy gets spread.
Most of the descriptions here say that the cure works in a couple of minutes. That is about how long most of my episodes take to pass anyway. That’s not to say that none of these things are effective it is just to say that without a rather large study it is not possible to know which remedies are effective with any certainty. It is hard to imagine how such a study would be conducted given the unpredictability and infrequency of occurance and the wide variety of proposed remedies.
Another bartender’s cure: drink a few ounces of the brine pickles are packed in.
I was at a table in a bar and had hiccups. The guy setting next to me, who I barely knew, asked me if I had accidently picked up the change from his $20. No, I didn’t get your change. Yes, it was right here, you must have just grabbed it by mistake. No, I haven’t picked up any money. Yes, you had to have picked it up. NO! I DON’T HAVE YOUR MONEY!! No, and you don’t have the hiccups anymore.
Cured me. It was a while before I could try it on somebody, a girl at the same bar. She got agitated a lot faster than I did when I accused her of “stealing” my change, but her hiccups went away.
So the trick is to have someone accuse you of stealing without you knowing about it 