Well, that's the popular view, anyway. In reality, there are plenty of healing tricks hiding between the extremes of modern medicine and New Age insanity. Even better, a whole bunch of them are the sort of stuff you do every day! Well, maybe not all of you ...

There are two ways to cure an ailment: go to the doctor and suck up whatever treatment they prescribe you, or let your friendly neighborhood shaman do the feathered snake dance on you while Jenny McCarthy screams bullshit about vaccinations in the background.

5 Fingering Your Asshole Can Cure Hiccups

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Note about that headline: This is not a fake article.

There are about a thousand home remedies for hiccups, with varying levels of effectiveness. You can hold your breath until your diaphragm resets. You can have the hiccups scared away. You can even eat a spoonful of sugar, which we're told is effective but carries a high risk of accidentally summoning Mary Poppins. But we hold ourselves to a higher standard. We strive to bring you the absolute best, most impressive way to get rid of that stupid diaphragm tic. We're prepared to dig as deep as it takes. Really, really deep. Butthole deep.

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Which, coincidentally, is where the Cracked editors go to defend against orcs.

Yes, science says it's possible to stop your intractable hiccups with a good rectal massage, and yes, they're being serious. It appears that the hiccups are closely connected with the vagus nerve, which runs all the way from your brain to your diaphragm ... and finally, near the rectum. The nerve interacts with others near the diaphragm, causing the fully formed "fuck you, body" experience that is the hiccups. The only moderately certain way to truly calm down that nerve is to confuse it with deliberate overstimulation (such as scaring someone to make their whole body flinch), and the most effective way to do that is to ... manually access it. Which, of course, means sticking stuff up your butt.

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The proud researchers behind the Ig Nobel-worthy finding used something called a "digital rectal massage" to stimulate the vagus nerve, but for those of us with analog asses and/or an aversion to getting fingered by a robot, a simple human finger should suffice. Maybe your own. Maybe a friend's. You never know what will happen, come the next hiccups party!