Posted by
Rajjpuut's Folly on Friday, May 29, 2009 4:02:38 PM
Hiccup Phobia
This blog is a serious commentary. Clearly everyone knows that hiccups are a very trivial matter. Certainly hiccups do NOT rank in importance with all those supremely crucial matters to which this erudite blog is normally dedicated. Accordingly, like the parables of Jesus in the New Testament, the hiccup will be introduced only to make a point about more serious matters, hak koff, koff.
If you explored “hiccups” on the internet, you’d find tens of thousands of old wives’ cures and home remedies claiming to “stop hiccups.” One site I saw listed 250 such treatments. Of course, the very volume of all this speaks to ignorance. If you contract strep throat you go in and get a shot of antibiotics and barring a super-mutant strain of strep on steroids, that ends the problem. Not so with hiccups.
Ignorance truly is bliss sometimes, except, of course, when it is a curse. I was talking to a psychologist friend of mine the other day. He occasionally tells me about “creative treatments” for various little mental aberrations he sees from time to time and I give him the straight skinny on things like fitness and longevity from a health educator’s point of view. On this day, James mentioned that three times in the last five years he’d encountered patients with a “hiccup phobia.” It seems that all three patients were already seeing him for relatively minor neuroses but had later stumbled upon a copy of the “Guinness Book of World Records” and become so obsessed with the possibility of developing “life-threatening hiccups” that full-blown phobias had developed. The case of American Charles Osborne who hiccupped from 1922 to 1990 documented among the world records and the sad case of a girl whose hics could be heard half a mile away seem to have struck a resonant chord with his clients and he told me his patients were not an isolated incident, but rather he and his colleagues had discussed several other such cases.
As resident know-it-all, I told him that because I was in possession of 100% effective knowledge about how to cure hiccups with 100% effectiveness, I thought that, imparting that knowledge for him to impart to his patients could immediately
alleviate their fears: case solved. He scoffed, as learned men are wont to do. “Don’t give me that crap, Bob, everybody has a pet way to cure hiccups. None of them work all the time.”
I demurred, telling him, not only did I know how to clear up hiccups 100% effectively, but he did too. “Go on,” he said.
“How would you treat a socialite who feared that her perspiration was obnoxious and had developed such a phobia of sweating in public that she truly suffered from an easily measurable excessive perspiration?” Slyly I'd given him the rough outline of a case he'd mentioned to me fifteen years ago.
He laughed, “No-brainer. We have her shower but apply no deodorant or anti-perspirant, then wear a sleeveless-backless gown and when she attends the next function she is to make every deliberate effort to “stink them all out” and pump out a river of sweat to drown everyone else at the party. When she emerges dry as the Sahara Desert, she’s cured.”
“Hiccups are the same,” I claimed.
“Son of a b____!” my learned friend said.
And so it is. Hiccups and perspiration, body temperature and chemical balances, pulse and digestion, respiration and salivation, eye blinks and toenail growth are all under the control of the autonomic nervous system. Left alone they are virtually infallible in carrying out their vital jobs well below the level of conscious effort, but try to control them for very long and you can do yourself a world of hurt because it’s “not nice to fool Mother Nature.”
Despite my constant efforts, after detecting my first “hic,” to break Mr. Osborne’s world record . . . . I rarely get out a second one. When I do, then I pump my fist in the air a few times and yell, “Yes, yes, yes and strive powerfully for a quick string of five hics in a row. To date my personal record is a pathetic six hics in a row lasting perhaps 20 seconds. I am mightily ashamed I tell you. Now, you ask
“What in the world has that story got to do with anything?” What, indeed?
As I mentioned earlier, hiccups certainly do NOT compare to weightier matters like the health care crisis, galloping socialism, inflation, the rape of the taxpayer, our new president’s interference in the free market, the rape of the taxpayer and the imminent inflation that’s been created, the choice of a shoot-from the hip judge as a Supreme Court nominee, the failure of today’s journalists to upheld their trust by keep the voting public informed through unbiased presentation of the facts of American life, etc., etc. However, perhaps we can apply the humble “Hiccup Parable” to each and everyone of those more serious subjects?
Perhaps you would NOT be shocked to know that medical doctors here in the United States have occasionally treated “runaway” hiccups for weeks or even months at a time. The lesson that I would draw from that is to “never go where you don’t belong.” The lesson applies equally for doctors treating hiccups and presidents wasting obscene amounts of taxpayer money on bailouts instead of letting normal bankruptcies alleviate matters. What is the end result of the auto bailouts?
Two bankruptcies, in fact, if not in name, and $100 billion in taxpayer funds wasted. What would have been the result without Obamanomics . . . two bankruptcies and not one red cent of taxpayer monies wasted. On a more humorous personal note, three decades after the original Chrysler bailout, Lee Iacocca, the former Chairman of Chrysler in 1979 who engineered that bailout, just lost much of his pension and benefits with the recent bankruptcy of the the firm. Talk about poetic justice, it warms the very cockles of my heart and soul.
Those same “hiccup” doctors, never fail to charge the patients they can’t cure and don’t cure for . . . office visits and examination fees and then, of course if and when nature takes its course and the patient loses the hiccups, would you be surprised if the doctor didn’t take credit for the cure? Doctor Barak is using the “tried and true methods of the New Deal today. The economy under Roosevelt didn’t cure itself until World War II brought an economic boom and all his interferences actually heavily prolonged the stock market panic into three separate stock market crashes. Despite the fact that the figures say the bottom of the Great Depression was mid-July, 1933, 140 days after FDR took office. Roosevelt’s Depression lasted roughly nine years.
If perchance, the medicines the doctor’s prescribe for hiccups bring about an adverse reaction . . . unlikely, you say. Ah, well . . . did you know that an American is ten times more likely to enter the hospital for an adverse reaction to prescribed medication than for an automobile accident? He is also four times more likely to die from that very same drug reaction than from injuries in a car crash. Extending the parable into presidential policies again . . . Doctor Barak is prescribing medications for the country that are 100% likely to bankrupt future generation and debase the American dollar through runaway inflation. As you know, some cures are much worse than the underlying problem they’re prescribed for.
Any politician like Nancy Pelosi who has not read and understood Leonard Read’s delightful little essay, “I, Pencil” is like an M.D. who has neither read nor understood the Hippocratic Oath “First, do no harm!”) I invite all Americans to understand what makes the Free Market work and indeed, what makes civilized human societies possible: