• Question: What is the best way to get rid of hiccups?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anna Bramwell-Dicks

      Anna Bramwell-Dicks answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      This is interesting because it depends on how you define “best”.

      For me, the best way to get rid of hiccups is the most fun way – which is probably being scared by someone/something! But I’m not actually sure how scientifically effective that is…

      So, if you mean best to be the “most effective” then there are a few different ways you can try:
      – if you take a deep breath and hold it then the amount of carbon dioxide in your lungs will increase, which in turn relaxes your diaphragm.
      – put your fingers in your ears and count to 30.. apparently this sends a “relax” signal to a nerve that is connected to your diaphragm.

      But, as far as I can tell, these methods haven’t been scientifically explored in clinical trials.

      There is a good reason for this – if I wanted to run an experiment looking at the different treatments for hiccups, I would need to get a lot of different people into my lab, make them hiccup and then try the different methods to stop them hiccupping. But.. how do you make someone hiccup?

    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      There doesn’t appear to be one single successful way of doing this. Presumably because we’re all different and the cause of them is not always the same. So (like a lot of different medical drugs) different things will be successful in different people.

      As Anna suggests, most of the ways to get rid of them seems to involve sudden distraction or shock techniques, which can be useful when your body’s got into a loop that it can’t seem to get out of. But few of them seem to have been subject to real scientific analysis. I suspect this is partly due to the scientists having trouble finding people to work on in the first place. Unless of course you know of some clever way in which you can (safely?) induce them in someone in the first place?!

Comments