Why does being scared cure hiccups

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Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. So if you've had hiccups for more than two days, it could be time to see a doctor. Many so-called hiccup cures have existed for quite some time — drinking water, holding your breath, eating sugar, having someone scare you, and on and on.

B ut doctors are still trying new things. Two publications from and describe case studies of a doctor massaging a patient's rectum to cure intractable hiccups. And in , another group reported a case of someone who had hiccups for four days and then was cured after ejaculating during sex. Both activities stimulate the vagus nerve, which helps control unconscious activity of the heart and digestive tract. Francis Fesmire, the doctor who published the first rectal massage study, later said that he would recommend sex as a cure instead.

The few folk remedies that seem to be based on a reasonable scientific concept involve holding your breath or breathing into a paper bag. At least for patients with intractable hiccups, increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide they breathe has been shown to decrease how often they hiccup. Breathing into a paper bag would also increase carbon dioxide in the body.

Despite all these intriguing possibilities about how to cure hiccups, the medical literature usually stops with just a case study of one or two patients. And that doesn't really say much. To know if something actually works, doctors need to perform a controlled medical trial where half the people receive the treatment in question and half receive a placebo for comparison.

And hiccups just haven't been a hot area for such trials, which can also be fairly expensive to do. One recent systematic review of previous medical studies concluded: "We searched for good quality studies that involved adult patients 18 or older who had experienced hiccups for 48 hours or more.

Our conclusion is that there is insufficient evidence to recommend a particular treatment for hiccups. So if you end up with seriously intractable hiccups that have gone on for a really long time, doctors will pretty much just try a bunch of random things. They might suction out your stomach or try various drugs. MLH 1. BOD-ities: Can scaring someone really cure their hiccups?

Stevens, DO. Related Providers. Army soldier in Killeen, Texas, shows that a belief in the folk cure of scaring away hiccups can have tragic effects when taken to the extreme, but does the cure have any basis if administered within reason? Isaac Lawrence Young, 22, died after allegedly being shot and killed by a fellow soldier trying to startle him out of a case of hiccups while the two men watched a football game.

The accused shooter, Pfc. Patrick Edward Myers, 27, claims he thought his gun was loaded with blanks and is charged with manslaughter, Reuters reported.