Anecdotal and not guaranteed to work for everyone: I have found holding my breath for as long as possible stops hiccups. And you can't cheat with this, you literally have to hold your breath until you think you're going to die. Most people don't like unpleasant situations like that, so when I suggest it, they scoff, but for me it works most of the time.<p>I think the reason it works, is it dampens the power the spasms have, by doing a pattern interrupt. 'Oh looks like we can't do spasms anymore, this person is running out of oxygen, let's re-allocate resources to things like breathing properly'.
I was strongly hoping that they'd be telling their audience to stick things up their butt. Alas not, but the method is, in the words of pokémon masters everywhere, "Super Effective" and won an IgNobel. <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2299306/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2299306/</a><p>Just look up "digital rectal massage". Digital here means with fingers.
> I asked Morris why he never took his hiccup research further. “Why did we never do a clinical trial? Well, you know, we got busy,” he said. “But also, how would we do a clinical trial? Who would pay for it? There’s no drug we can sell. Nobody will invest the money and hire all the people and do all the regulatory paperwork, because there’s no money to be made.”<p>Our health-care system is not designed to promote free cures. Patent laws allow innovators to profit from the discoveries they make or inventions they create, but only if those discoveries or inventions can be packaged as a product that enables some form of commercial gatekeeping. SSMI has no such market potential: It can be described in a couple of sentences, and copyright doesn’t cover it.<p>It’s hard to suppress the feeling that the crucial difference between SSMI and HiccAway is that only one of them can be monetized. I don’t at all think Seifi is motivated primarily by profit; he seems rightly proud to help people avoid a major minor nuisance. And he worked exceptionally hard for years to make the HiccAway straw a success.<p>But with that same motivation, could someone have done the same for the breathing technique? Maybe, for all the challenges of building a successful company, publicizing valuable but free information is even harder.
My method: swallow water while holding your breath and pinching your nose. Learned this at a young age, it definitely works. I think it creates the pressure that the article discusses.
Totally anecdotal, but it has worked on everyone that I've shared this with. Take a paper towel and put it over a cup of water and drink the water through the paper towel. I'm guessing the net affect of this is similar to the straw mentioned in the article. It feels easier to do that a breathing exercise.<p>It also does work while being inebriated
I've learned while raising my babies that making them laugh or cry can cure their hiccups. Crying is obviously not an attractive option for adults, but I suppose faking a laugh might do the trick.