From 1922 to 1990, that is for 68 years, an American named Charles Osborne lived with constant hiccups.
Hiccups may be a harmless and painless reflex phenomenon, but they can be very debilitating, especially when they drag on. So imagine having a hiccup that lasts…68 years! This is what happened to Charles Osborne, an American pig farmer who still holds the record for the longest hiccup attack today, we learn. The Parisian.
24,000 hiccups a day
The American started hiccuping in 1922 while slaughtering a pig. The crisis is then acute: Charles Osborne hiccups on average 40 times per minute, against 6 tremors usually. It is estimated that he hiccupped 24,000 times a day, or some 595,680,000 times during his life. Invited on the TV and radio sets of shows like “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”, “That’s Incredible” and “The Tonight Show”, he had even acquired a certain notoriety across the Atlantic, to the point of appearing prominently in the Guinness Book of Records.
An article from Price Economics tells that during the first years, Charles Osborne consulted many specialists (96 in total) and experimented with hundreds of different remedies. “He’s received nearly 4,000 letters of sympathy and home remedies over the years, but none of them – from finger massage to pressure on the right side of his chin – have worked. Today he dismisses every suggestion with a curt “I’ve tried that before,” the magazine reported People in 1982.
According to Price Economics, Osborne’s only moment of fleeting solace came in the late 1970s, when an Illinois specialist decided he had found that he was missing “a small area of the brainstem, inhibiting the hiccup response”. He was then put on an experimental hormone drug that cleared him of the hiccups for 36 hours, but after experiencing equally intolerable side effects, he refused to continue the treatment.
A relatively “normal” life
Gradually, Charles Osborne learned to ease hiccups by incorporating breathing techniques into his daily routine. Although the hiccups subsided when he was asleep, it immediately resumed when he opened his eyes every morning. He was unable to eat solid food. To avoid choking, all his meals were reduced to liquid form.
Despite these disadvantages, Osbourne lived a life that he considered relatively “normal”. He continued to work with pigs for many years, first as a hog auctioneer and later as a farm machinery salesman. He married twice and had 8 children. Luckily for him, the rhythm of his hiccups ended up decreasing in intensity, until completely disappearing in February 1990. He died a year later, at the age of 97, following a complication of an ulcer.
What causes hiccups?
Hiccups are caused by irritation of a nerve as it passes through the diaphragm, causing the respiratory muscles to contract suddenly and involuntarily. In its acute form (the one that everyone knows), we know that the causes are mainly digestive, in particular in the event of inflammation of the esophagus.
This occurs when you swallow air while eating, by excessively absorbing carbonated and alcoholic drinks, or by eating too hot or too cold. The sudden change in room temperature, smoking – more than 10 cigarettes a day – emotion, stress, excessive laughter, coughing or even tickling can lead to an “attack” of hiccups. In all these cases, it remains benign.
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