Hiccups and How to Cure Them

Hiccups are incredibly annoying but I have a sure-fire cure that has has never failed me; it's very simple, Ive used it for years and here it is...one tablespoon of lemon juice. That's right! Lemon juice is all it takes to stop hiccups in their tracks. If you're reading this because you have a bad case of hiccups, try the lemon juice cure and let me know how you go.

I find it amazing how few people know about this simple remedy, which I only discovered using trial and error. Before discovering the lemon juice cure I'd gone through all the regular remedies, such as those listed below, none of which ever worked incidentally.

Traditional Hiccup Cures

• Drinking from the wrong side of the glass
• Getting someone to give you a fright
• A spoonful of sugar
• Hold your breath for 10 seconds
• Sing loudly
• Blow on your thumb as you would a balloon
  
• A spoonful of vinegar
• Cough five or six times in a row
• Plug your ears, take a deep breath and swallow. Repeat.
• Scream and hold it for as long as you can
• Laugh heartily
  

Hiccups are an involuntary, reflex action involving a repeated contraction of the diaphragm -a sudden burst of into the vocal chords causes a 'hiccup' sound to emerge. The correct medical term is synchronous diaphragmic flutter.They can occur when we overeat or get gas, eat too quickly, swallow too much air or drink too much alcohol.

Some researchers have suggested that the hiccup could be a throwback to an earlier evolutionary phase when we used an amphibian-like respiration system and gulped air and water across to gills.Premature babies spend 25% of their time hiccuping, gulping like tadpoles, as their lungs are not yet fully developed.

Hiccups that last for 48 hours or more re called persistant hiccups and if they last for week or months (which is rare but can be caused by major health problems) they are called intractable hiccups. Generally though, hiccups only last a few minutes.

Hiccups is a distinctly odd word. Have you ever wondered where it came from? Well not surprisingly, it simply derives from the sound we make when we hiccup, Also sometimes called hiccoughs, they are very common and all human beings will suffer from an attack of hiccus at some time in their life. Any animal that has a diaphragm may suffer from hiccups, thus all mammals are subject to them, however because animals have a different physiology, they may not sound the same as our hiccups.

Reputedly, American Charles Osborne had the longest recored case of hiccups in the world. The poor man had to suffer them from 1922 to 1990...that's 68 years! His case was recorded in the Guiness Book of World Records - I wonder if he ever tried lemon juice? Jennifer Mee, an American teenager, hiccuped fifty times per minute for five weeks, which couldn't have been much fun. As a by the by, Mee was charged with first degree murder in 2010, after allegedly luring a young man to his death.