At our Sixth Day of Christmas party yesterday, Delf started talking
about burns from hot peppers, which reminded me of a crazy thread
that I read a while back, Listening to habeneros,
and of a sure-fire cure for hiccups from
Diane Duane.
Me, when I get hiccups,
I just take a very deep breath and hold it for as long as I can.
If it doesn't work the first time, it does on the second attempt.
Cure #1, letting a large spoonful of sugar dissolve in the mouth,
is the only cure that's ever worked for Emma.
Hiccups are the result of a blood serum electrolyte balance. The causes
are various: talking too much while eating (my favorite), eating or
drinking too fast, etc etc, whatever. Different causes tend to induce
different kinds of imbalance. The imbalances are these:
- Respiratory acidosis -- too much CO2 in the blood.
- Respiratory alkalosis -- too little CO2 in the blood.
When you get one or the other of these, the body's tendency is to try
to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs' contents in and out a
lot faster, so that if there isn't enough CO2, some more can get into
the bloodstream, and if there's too much, some can get out. Now, the
body doesn't want to bother your conscious mind about this, so it does
it in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your
diaphragm spasm, compressing the lungs and shoving most of their tidal
volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.
Now, you'd think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly,
and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem
right. Well, probably it will: but it takes forever, and you're sitting
there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can
themselves make the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to
take drastic measures.
It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups
themselves is to quickly increase the imbalance significantly. The
intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most
common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn't work, the less
common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw
materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you
can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you're
most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and
hiccuping.
(Part 1:) Juli got this one right. Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry,
in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed
directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is
kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden
extreme change in the blood chemistry, "calls off" the hiccups as
ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The
"spoonful of sugar" approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of
hiccuppers.
If this doesn't work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than
mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.
(Part 2:) Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking
teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It's
gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang,
right away.
If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis,
but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.
(Part 3:) Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it.
Their hiccups will then vanish.
It is important to do these things in order and not try to cut back
on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and
you'll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying,
especially if you're on a low-sodium diet or just don't feel like
retaining liters and liters of water the next day. But if you follow
these instructions faithfully, the hiccups should vanish, pretty much
without fail. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with
this.
A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane's Law of
Embarrassment Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone
whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you'll fall very
low in their estimation if you don't, they will always be alkalotic,
and you will always have to run through all the stages, feeling dumber
and more desperate every moment as you go along. (This law first became
plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my "Science Challenge" producer at
the BBC: if I hadn't proven I was good at the science part by curing
him, well, you can imagine.)
And an afterthought: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures
service this mechanism in one way or another, by quickly and
emphatically changing the blood electrolyte balance. Scaring the person
(causes acidosis: see The Andromeda Strain), drinking water upside
down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the
CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto),
whatever: they are all thin pale versions of the One True Cure, trying
with greater or lesser effectiveness to shove the blood electrolytes
around.
Now go all ye and spread the word, that there may be fewer hiccups in
the world.