How to stop hiccups

Ever encountered a non-stop hiccup session yourself? Or found someone with hiccups that don’t seem to stop? Well I have a remedy for that. Try it and you will be regarded as a saint.

But before I giveaway a tested treatment, an assured one too, let me list some of the most common remedial measures:

• Hiccups normally occur during a meal and some other times rarely. So most people recommend drinking a few sips of water. It never works, at least for me.
• Some suggest holding on to your breath for 30 seconds. Never tried, I would rather live with hiccups than dying if I cannot restore my breathing after 30 seconds.
• Drink a large glass of water in one go till you cant do it and stop to take air. So take a deep breath and gulp again. Well I can take a big glass of “lassi” in one go, but cant take a full glass of water.
• Get a bowl full of ice cold water and immerse your face in it for 30 seconds. Oh 30 seconds again. Since I am a non swimmer, such exercise is not for me anyway.
• Put a paper towel over a glass of water and hold it around the sides and drink through the paper towel.
• Swallow a teaspoon of sugar – could be tried but taking raw sugar is not advised by doctors.

And if your hiccups don’t stop by following above mentioned tricks, consult a doctor. But doctor would charge you lot of many, so why waste it. So ask me how to stop it. Well….. for free?? No way. But this one time, since I opened this hiccup Pandora Box, I will do it for free.

Once my brother got into hiccups and there was no way of stopping these failed engine ignitions like sounds. Suddenly my mother said’ “Close your fly, you naughty boy. Don’t you know how to sit in the presence of ladies?” We all froze as our mother had never talked like this. And my brother also froze and looked down to zip up his fly – but the fly was already zipped. So he told our mother that the fly was closed already. My mother smiled and said, “Yes I can see that – but where are your hiccups?” And sure enough, the hiccups had gone.

The moral of the story is: Immediately divert the patient’s attention to something unusual. The sudden distraction over works the brain signals to divert the existing signals to a new direction – that is to say from hiccups to an open fly.

Related reading (conventional): How to stop hiccups