Hiccups, those annoying muscle spasms that interrupt your sentences when you’re talking to your friends, prompting them to laugh and mimic you so you don’t get to finish your story. Well we’re happy to say that a scientist has developed an instant cure for them and it was inspired by people who suck on the so called ‘straw’ of the McDonald’s McFlurry.
Wait a minute, straw? It’s clearly an ice cream dessert which is why they’ve provided you with a spoon so why would you try to drink it? You can only think about doing that when it’s melted.
Hiccups are involuntary contractions of your diaphragm which is the muscle that separates your chest from your abdomen and is part of the breathing process.
Each time you take a breath, your vocal cords suddenly close for a brief moment which creates the hiccup sound. In this case, sucking on the McFlurry straw so hard causes your diaphragm to contract which gives the hiccups.
Dr. Ali Seifi, a neuro-intensive care physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center noticed his son try to suck up the ice cream in his McFlurry using the ‘straw’ with great difficulty which gave him the hiccups. This prompted him to create the HiccAway, an L-shaped straw which is similar in design to a Mcflurry spoon.
The HiccAway has a mouthpiece at one end and a pressure valve at the other which work together in order to eliminate hiccups.
How it works is that the user must exert a large amount of suction force to pull liquids up through the straw which causes their abdomen to lower and their epiglottis (a piece of cartilage behind your tongue) to close.
Next, the vagus and phrenic nerves which control your diaphragm and breathing motions are stimulated which forces your brain to reset itself, thus getting rid of your hiccups.
Hicc, Hicc, Hooray!
