Wednesday, May 09, 2012

13-year-old girl invents hiccup-curing lollipops

A 13-year-old girl has not only supposedly cured the hiccups, but she has become a CEO in the process. Mallory Kievman is CEO and founder of Hiccupops, a company that might just have cured one of the world's oldest and most annoying conditions. Kievman is preparing to launch her product, the Hiccupop, a hiccup-stopping lollipop of her own invention, with a patent pending, financial backers, and a team of business consultants.

Kievman says that she got the idea after trying to tame a stubborn bout of hiccups two years ago by using any home remedy she came upon: Drinking saltwater, sipping water out of an upside-down cup, eating spoonfuls of sugar, slurping pickle juice. She had developed the product in her family’s Manchester, Conn., kitchen, amalgamating her three favorite cures — lollipops, apple cider vinegar and sugar — into a single confection.



"I'm still "tweaking the taste," she says. But the combination of ingredients "triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc... It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup."

Speculation as to whether Hiccupops is a profitable company has provoked some people to come out and advocate for the 13-year-old CEO. "It's very rare, when you're evaluating businesses, that you can envision a company or product being around 100 years from now," Danny Briere, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Startup Connecticut, which nurtures new companies, including Hiccupops, and is a regional affiliate of the Startup America Partnership, said. "Hiccupops is one of those things. It solves a very simple, basic need," he added.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

God bless this child! If they work, she has just made my life so much better.

Unknown said...

Easier...peanut butter. A *big* spoon of it swallowed as fast as you can manage stops them almost instantly. I've had GERD for over a decade and can have staggeringly painful hiccups, so I figured this out fairly quickly.

Hiccups are done by the diaphragm, not the throat and mouth, so I'm not sure the pops even make sense. The coordination of peristaltic muscles to swallow a lump of pb...that makes sense. Shame I can't make a profit from it.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry, but I smell a rat here.

Bacopa said...

I trained my self to stop hiccups when I was 12 or so by doing this thing where I just sit up straight with my knees slightly parted, get my body as symmetrical as I can, and kist think them away.

I can't do it when I'm drunk.

Wolf said...

I would buy these. But it's a diaphragm thing like someone said so I don't see how throat and mouth has anything to do with it. Then again, if it makes them go away then I'm more than happy to use them. Very few home remedies seem to help for me.

Jezabelle said...

Swallowing a teaspoon of peanut butter has always worked.