Hiccups: The question, the answer

Today brings many news reports of a baffling medical case:

Florida Girl Has Hiccups For 3 Straight Weeks

Teen can’t shake hiccups

Hiccups heard round the world
etc.

The solution is at hand. The man who devised it: Dr. Francis Fesmire. Dr. Fesmire’s achievement was honored this past October:

2006 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize

Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage“; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.”
REFERENCE: “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,” Francis M. Fesmire, Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 17, no. 8, August 1988 p. 872.
REFERENCE: “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage,”
Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven, Journal of Internal Medicine, vol. 227, no. 2, February 1990, pp. 145-6. They are at the Department of Internal Medicine, Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel.
REFERENCE: “Hiccups and Digital Rectal Massage,” M. Odeh and A. Oliven, Archives of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery, vol. 119, 1993, p. 1383.

Improbable Research