How a 13 year old may have invented the cure for hiccups

Like it? Share it!

How a 13 year old may have invented the cure for hiccups

Everyone has some sort of remedy for hiccups— hold your breath, drink water, stand on your head, but one rather clever 13 year old thinks she’s invented a lollipop to cure any case of hiccups, and she’s looking to launch a startup to get her hiccup cure off the ground.

Mallory Kievman, a 13-year-old from Manchester, Conn., invented the lollipop in her kitchen after a bout of annoying hiccups. The pops are made with apple cider vinegar and sugar. The vinegar, she told the New York Times, overstimulates the nerves in your throat responsible for hiccups and “cancels out the message to hiccup.”

Kievman told Mashable she did tons of research online to learn everything there is to know about hiccups, and then combined those ideas with her own inventiveness. She read everything from research on cats that showed how to incite hiccups, to clinical trials from the 1970s that tested the use of sugar on the back of the tongue (it actually worked in stopping sporadic hiccups in 18 of 20 patients). As for using apple cider vinegar, “I was reading an article somewhere about uses for vinegar and apple cider vinegar was in that story for getting rid of hiccups,” she recalled. So Kievman put the vinegar into her patent-pending portable pops.

Kievman’s been touring a variety of competitions with her startup invention — and the idea has been well-received. At the Connecticut Innovation Competition for kids, Hiccupops was recognized for its “innovation and patentability,” states the Times article. Kievman has also taken Hiccupops to a couple Connecticut economic and innovation summits.

Via