This 13-Year-Old Has a Cure for Hiccups
And guess what? It’s a lollipop
Mother of invention, meet your daughter. Mallory Kievman may be on the cusp of resolving one of life’s most stubborn mysteries, right up there with black holes, Stonehenge, and what that thing is on top of Donald Trump’s head. The 13-year-old has cooked up a cure for the hiccups.
Mallory’s hiccup stopper comes in the form of a lollipop she calls the Hiccupop. Her idea for this little sucker graduated from cute to commercial at an invention convention in Connecticut. You may already be familiar with invention conventions as grade-school events where kids display their creative designs for things like the Automatic Bed Maker or The Annoying Brother Shutter Upper (patents pending). But Mallory isn’t messing around. She wants to be a doctor someday and has a particular Hiccupop user in mind: cancer patients, she has sensitively noted, are often beset with hiccups as a side effect of chemotherapy. At a more formal convention near her home in Manchester, Conn., Mallory met up with financiers who wanted to back her idea and help her bring it to market.
There are still challenges ahead for young Mallory, but according to the New York Times she’s enlisting a team of MBA students to develop her company, with the teen entrepreneur remaining at the helm. In addition to being CEO, she’s the head of Research & Development — with a little assistance from her dad, she’s been tweaking her recipe in the kitchen at home. Hiccupop’s admixture of lollipops, apple cider vinegar and sugar needs to be more palatable, she says, but the combination of ingredients seems to affect the nerves in the throat and mouth believed to cause the hiccup reflex. “It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup,” Mallory told the Times.
What about product testing? Imagine the boardrooms of angel investors, where suited millionaires sit patiently around a conference table for hours, a box of lollipops on the table, just waiting for someone to get a case of the hiccups. Hiccupops have the mark of many great, and greatly successful, products: an innovation that addresses a common need with a simple solution. If Mallory's pops work, they’ll be worth the wait.
Photo: Andrew Sullivan
hiccups but a hiccup in the rhythms of the diaphragm so it makes sense all the listed try-outs worked for various people. Logically, when something stimulates the palate, the process of digestive mechanism changes the way we breathe. For instance, having a spoonful of sugar in your mouth will slow down the breathing (savoring the taste?), while tasting something sour, like lemon or vinegar, will interupt the breathing by quickening of inhaling/exhaling, etc. In addition, any food in the mouth will increase saliva, which in turn will affect the swallowing motion that which in turn, will affect the diaphragm. Add to that, the process of having a lollipop (the suckling motion) will probably allow for the return to the normal breathing rhythm of the body.
After all is said, good for her! America definitely needs more stuff!! Though... 99% of all hiccups go away by themselves after few minutes. The lollipops will be good for chronic and long term hiccups sufferers.
Let us suckle on, I say! lol
What kind of a total moron are you? I suppose the idea of finding a better source of energy should be abandoned because that wouldn't cure arthritis? The two conditions are totally separate, and if I read the intentions of THAT girl right.....I'm sure that out of the MILLIONS she will make curing the hiccups, quite a few dollars will be spent getting her medical degree, and possibly curing cancer! If you have been around any cancer patient going through chemo, as I have, the hiccups are an extremely uncomfortable, aggravating condition that I can guarantee they will be very grateful to get rid of. People like you need to stick to solving the problems they understand, like if the next guy in line wants fries with his burger!
As for the young lady the article is about.....I'm not sure if you read any of these....but the world needs more like you.....MANY more! You're the kind of young person that gives this world hope! God Bless You!!!
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