MINNEAPOLIS — They happen to the best of us and, once they start, there’s often no controlling them. Hiccups are a part of life, but a Wisconsin doctor believes they may be closer to an actual cure.
“We don’t really know exactly how common hiccups are because they are so common,” Dr. Stephen Stacey, a physician with the Mayo Clinic in La Crosse, Wisconsin, said.
Stacey is one of the few experts in the field, but there’s a hiccup in the research.
“They don’t really cause that much harm, so people haven’t really done a lot of research to see how common they are,” he said.
There’s also not much research on the cause, but it starts in the womb.
“So it may be the nervous system and the muscle just practicing before they put on the big show at birth,” Stacey said.
With the help of his residents, Stacey has researched the most important hiccup-related question: Is there a cure? He acknowledged some of the more popular “folk remedies,” such as scaring someone out of a hiccup jag.
“Scaring might work. It could be that when you’re scared, you’re holding your breath and the acid level in your blood goes up and that could trigger the hiccups to go away,” Stacey said.
Another popular method is hanging upside down. Stacey said there is no proof for that one. As for drinking water, Stacey says it can help you hold your breath, which has “the most evidence behind it.”
Stacey and his partner recently confirmed a cure with a study.
“We tried that on a lot of different people and it worked for all of them,” he said.
The key he says is “controlling the diaphragm and having the acid level go up.”
“Try breathing in and then keep your throat open, like you’re just about to talk, but you’re just breathing in and you’re still trying to move your diaphragm,” he said. “And then after about 30 seconds, you leave your throat open and then slowly breathe out.”
He says the key is leaving your throat open while holding your breath.
“People need to know about this,” Stacey said.
He says another hack that may also cure the hiccups is to chug a glass of water without coming for air.
Stacey says we don’t know what triggers hiccups and research is tricky because you have to catch people in the act. They researched the breathing technique by monitoring people in their clinics who just happened to have hiccups.
