Rubin: Got the hiccups? Helpful readers have dozens of cures.

Sometimes medical breakthroughs come from deep thought and research, and sometimes it's just being a first-year nurse and not wanting the patients to think you're drunk.

Mary McCarthy Kaunelis is retired now, living near Roscommon. Way back when, she was working the night shift at what's now Trinity Health Ann Arbor Hospital, hiccupping like she got a bonus for it, when a patient offered a suggestion.

I bring this up, by the way, because after a wrenching six-day bout with hiccups, last Sunday I asked you to share your cures. Kaunelis was one of 63 readers who sent suggestions, and bless everyone who passed along a notion, even the ones whose solutions involved knives.

Other recommendations touched on matches, beer, jazz, orange peels and a flinty U.S. Marine. Some had common themes: posture, plugged ears, the power of mind over spasmodic clenching of the diaphragm, which is basically what a hiccup is.

I appreciated every one of them, and I’m passing some along today in hopes they might ultimately aid you in a time of chest-heaving need.

It was either that or try to start a telethon, and I didn’t like my chances of getting free TV time for hiccups. So back we go to Kaunelis and her night-owl patient, who told her to first fill a glass with water.

Apply pressure to one of your ears, the patient said. Find someone to cover the other, as though to block out an unwelcome sound like, I dunno, hiccups. Then chug the water.

“This worked that night and has always worked,” Kaunelis said — and she’s a trained professional, after all.

There were several other permutations of ear-plugging among the recommendations, some involving an assistant and others requiring an impressive level of dexterity.

Kind reader Bryan Glazer said to plug your ears with your index fingers, pinch your nose with your thumbs and have your assistant help you imbibe from a water bottle. Former dentist Kerry Cairns said he made the same general discovery in college, with the same hand positions, but substituting beer for water.

The silly appearance, he said, masks the effective reality, which is that "it is a forced way to stop breathing until the phrenic nerve irritation subsides."

Theresa Jordan assigns her thumbs to her ears and her index fingers to her nose, and uses her other digits to hold a glass of water while she forms a seal with her lips and drinks from the far rim.

“I don’t know if it’s because of the upside down position, the vacuum seal or a combination of both,” Jordan said.

All she’s sure of is that this technique has throttled her hiccups for more than 40 years.

Outsmarting the affliction

Merrilee Melvin takes a more direct approach — "a sip, or possibly two, of apple cider vinegar straight out of the bottle. I let the vinegar flow over the back of my throat, and that does the trick."

From what I remember of the taste of apple cider vinegar, I might prefer hiccups, at least for a day or two. Or I might try an orange peel, doctored the way Billiejo Allen-Miller takes hers.

"I have hiccups a lot," she said, and the only thing that squelches them is eating a slice of orange, peel included, with a packet of sugar and a few splashes of bitters.

I did not get a chance, unfortunately, to ask her how she arrived at that recipe, or what experiments didn't quite get the job done before she found the right combination.

Jim Moll's dad and four of his uncles served in World War II, and bless them, they all came home. Uncle Carl, a Marine, had a grip that would crush brick and a stare that would melt pig iron, and never mind this foolishness about an irritated vagus nerve or an overactivated phrenic nerve causing hiccups.

Hiccups were all in your head, Uncle Carl contended, and defeating them was just a matter of taking charge. He'd tell the nieces and nephews to stare at him while he growled, "Go on, hiccup if you can. I don't think you've got it in you. Focus now. Hiccup!"

"Worked every time," said Moll, of Farmington Hills. "I used it with my kids — without Uncle Carl's menacing tone."

John Ma said his family’s remedy is also mental, rather than physical.

Close your eyes, the Mas tell one another, and think about the last meal you ate. If it was dinner, ponder the smell of the food, the texture, the taste. Recall the beverage and the dessert and the utensils.

“Really dig your brain into the details of the food and the experience,” Ma said, then backtrack to lunch and do the same.

“By the time you go through breakfast,” he said, “your hiccups should have subsided.”

The key is distraction, said Jon Forslund, who’s wrapping up his 38th year on the Canton High School faculty.

He’ll tell students to time the intervals between their hiccups. Estimates won’t do; he wants precise measurements of a dozen or more with a device that covers fractions of a second.

“If you miss even one,” he said, “start the process over again.”

After one or two rounds, there’s no longer anything to measure.

Sharp notes, bright flames, dull knives

Cary Heller, of Keego Harbor, gets hiccups frequently and stifles them with a soundtrack.

"Ask any jazz trumpeter or saxophonist how many gigs were interrupted because of hiccups," he said. "The answer is none."

The lesson from that, he said, is to "focus on breath coming in and going out. Pretend like you’re John Coltrane or Miles Davis, and breathe the way they do. You can hear it in the records."

If that doesn't work, follow another jazz lead and improvise. "Drink from a cup from the opposite side," he said. "Always did the trick for me."

Water, giver of life, was cited repeatedly as a slayer of hiccups, sometimes with additives.

Light a match, said Julie Rose, extinguish it in a cup of water, throw it away, and drain the glass.

Wait, said Mike Simeck: Do the same thing, but with two matches, not one.

“It must be the sulfur,” he surmised. “Maybe you could eat the matches directly, but drinking the sulfury water is weird enough.”

Sarah Rohrbeck, of Richmond, needs to fend off hiccups with unfortunate regularity and still uses a method taught her by a friend’s mother more than 30 years ago.

Put a butter knife in a glass of cool water, she said, blade end down. Holding your breath, drink the water while touching the knife against your temple.

“Does the coldness of the knife against my temple shock my system into ‘restart’ mode?” she asked. “Is it simply that I’m holding my breath?”

She doesn’t care. All that matters, she said, is that “it works well enough to withstand years of constant teasing from family members as I stand in the kitchen drinking water while holding a butter knife to my temple.”

Former Michigander Mark Hodges, who works in hospice care in Port Charlotte, Florida, also uses a knife trick, one he learned long ago from a young woman in Hamtramck:

Glass of water, blade down, chin to chest, drink heartily from the outside rim.

Then there is George Schwab, who slides his knife into a glass with the blade up.

Press the knife against the far side of the glass, he said, and rest the blade against the center of your forehead. Drink slowly, keeping pressure on the knife while easing your fingers from it.

He said it never fails to curtail hiccups, maybe because a knife in close proximity to his head keeps his attention tightly focused.

I didn’t ask, but I assume he’s well insured.

Sweet news about sugar

My very own personal case of the hiccups was so bad I was unleashing them in my sleep, to the understandable annoyance of my wife.

I tried most of the standard remedies, including letting a spoonful of sugar dissolve on my tongue. While that's a simple process, it turns out I was doing it wrong.

Take a teaspoon of sugar in a cupped palm, said David Pearl, bend your head back, and fling the entire pile to the back of your throat. Swallow while it’s still granular, and the scratchiness of the dry sugar against the soft palate stops hiccups every time.

“You almost had it,” Sharon Pellar said. “Don’t let that spoonful of sugar dissolve. Try swallowing the whole thing at once. … It interrupts your air flow enough to stop those suckers.”

With that problem solved, she said, she had a question — “How do you stop those wretched Jardiance commercials?”

Some things, sadly, are beyond help or understanding. This I do know, however: I'm hugely grateful to those of you who shared your experience and wisdom, even though I didn't have room here for every nugget.

Karen Attaway, for instance, inhaled sharply after her most recent hiccup and slammed her throat shut three times, a sort of impression of a hiccup. The real hiccups vanished.

Larry Lawson said to have someone squeeze tightly on the nails of your middle fingers for at least a minute. Call it a poor man’s acupuncture; in his experience, it works every time.

Laurie McKinven-Copus takes a large mouthful of water, bends forward with her heard toward the ground, and swallows. More hiccup yoga: Darlene Domanik said to sit, draw a mighty breath, bend sharply to where your chest approaches your thighs, and hold your breath for at least a minute.

OK, I did find room for a few more.

As for my hiccups, they turned out to be a reaction to the anesthesia from an operation on my broken ankle. A prescription drug chased them away.

A few nights ago, though, I felt my chest lurch as my wife and I sat downstairs. She frowned, thinking the demon had returned. I only sneered.

Take your best shot, I said to myself. I have 63 hiccup-crushing remedies on my laptop upstairs, only a few keystrokes from being unleashed.

Within seconds, the tremors stopped. Aha, I thought, there's remedy No. 64:

Pure intimidation.

If it turns out none of these work for you, email Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com and he'll send you a few more.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Freep readers offer dozens of cures for hiccups after writer seeks help