Manchester Teen Creates Long-Sought Remedy to the Hiccups

A Manchester teen is making her mark on the world and may have discovered the long-sought cure to the hiccups and it doesn’t involve scaring someone, holding your breath, drinking anything upside down or any other old-fashioned remedy.

Mallory Kievman, 17, is a patented inventor and her creation, which she calls the “Hiccupop,” has worked to soothe her own hiccups and now she’s trying to bring them to the rest of the world.

Kievman, a junior in high school, suffered regular bouts of the hiccups in the summer of seventh grade. She refused to accept that there was nothing she could do about it, so Kievman spent hundreds of hours researching both the physiology of hiccups and the folk remedies that persisted, according to the Hiccupop website.

After weeks of trial and error (and continued hiccupping), Kievman identified three ingredients and approaches that worked to soothe her own hiccups: apple cider vinegar, sugar, and sucking a lollipop. Kievman combined all three and the “Hiccupop” was born.

The Hiccupop is believed to work by over-stimulating a set of nerves in the throat and mouth that may be responsible for the hiccup reflex arc, according to the website.

Doctors and nurses at top research institutions have expressed interest in Hiccupops, and further clinical research is being conducted this year.

Kievman told WTNH News 8 that Hiccupops are “very, very sour. It’s really sour and that helps sort of over stimulate the nerve that is most closely connected with the hiccup reflex. As you continue eating it, it gets sweeter and that’s partially what helps, the contrast of the sweet and the sour.”

According to Kievman, hiccups are a little-known side effect of medical treatments like cancer chemotherapy, kidney dialysis, and anesthesia and can dramatically affect the quality of life for many patients who are already suffering.

Kievman told WTNH News 8 that she’s been approached by a “top cancer research facility who is interested in testing these on patients.”

While Kievman’s scientific prowess is impressive, she delivered a keynote speech at the May 2014 CT Invention Convention and was a guest at this year’s White House Science Fair, she also had to work on overcoming numerous challenges in product formulation to achieve a shelf-stable lollipop.

She solved those production issues in her kitchen, only to repeat the process again during the scale-up that would allow Hiccupops to be produced on industrial-scale manufacturing equipment, according to her website. Hiccupops are now on the brink of commercialization, and are produced at a specialized facility in Texas.

Read more about the Hiccupops at the website here (where you can also purchase them).

Image via Disney’s “Make Your Mark” screenshot

Watch a video on Kievman’s appearance on Disney’s “Make Your Mark” below: