7. Scary relief
Among the crazy ideas that have been conjured up to help stop the hiccups, startling someone is about as useless as most of the others. There was never any real evidence to suggest that startling someone was effective at all in stopping hiccups. One potential treatment was actually printed in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1971, and that suggests eating a teaspoon of sugar. Research at the time claimed that out of 20 people with the hiccups who were given sugar, 19 of them stopped.