So it is true ... a shock really will stop the hiccups

When young man walked into the accident and emergency department of Univer- sity Hospital in Jacksonville, Tennessee, complaining of hiccups that had lasted three days, Francis Fesmire, who treated him, had little idea he was about to make medical history.

Yesterday, the American doctor’s innovative solution to the problem — an uncomfortable one that you might not wish to try at home — received the honour it deserves, an Ig Nobel Prize for research that “cannot or should not be reproduced”.

After trying a variety of standard hiccup cures, such as pulling the patient’s tongue and making him gag, Dr Fesmire decided on a different approach.

“Digital rectal massage was then attempted using a slow circumferential motion", he wrote in his seminal case report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “The frequency of hiccups immediately began to slow, with a termination of all hiccups within 30 seconds.”

Dr Fesmire’s unconventional therapy has since been replicated, by Majed Odeh of Zion Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, with whom he shared the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, in Harvard University’s annual spoof of the real Nobel awards.

You can see the full list of the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners here.