Finger in your ass cures hiccups? The IgNobel Awards are Back!

I don't know what a digital rectal massage is, but it still involves with a finger into your rectum

Other notable researches are italicized below

http://www.improbable.com/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2006

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

The ceremony was webcast at www.improbable.com. Recorded video will be posted here soon.

Two days after the ceremon y -- on Saturday, October 7 -- the new winners will give free public lectures at the Ig Informal Lectures.

MEDICINE: Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, for his medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center, Haifa, Israel, for their subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."

ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

NUTRITION: Wasmia Al-Houty of Kuwait University and Faten Al-Mussalam of the Kuwait Environment Public Authority, for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters.

PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.

ACOUSTICS: D. Lynn Halpern (of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University), Randolph Blake (of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University) and James Hillenbrand (of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University) for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

MATHEMATICS: Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, for calculating the number of photographs you must take to (almost) ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed

LITERATURE: Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."

PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

CHEMISTRY: Antonio Mulet, José Javier Benedito and José Bon of the University of Valencia, Spain, and Carmen Rosselló of the University of Illes Balears, in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."

BIOLOGY: Bart Knols (of Wageningen Agricultural University, in Wageningen, the Netherlands; and of the National Institute for Medical Research, in Ifakara Centre, Tanzania, and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna Austria) and Ruurd de Jong (of Wageningen Agricultural University and of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Italy) for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

 

Another funny moment at the awards:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=514779

No one left the ceremony empty handed. Winners and losers alike were treated to complimentary “Dr. Fran’s Anti-Hiccup Kits,” complete with surgical gloves and K-Y jelly.


Now that you have the necessary materials to replicate the procedures, you can follow the directions below:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20538892-30417,00.html

Dirty work for an Ig Nobel cause

Mark Henderson and Leigh Dayton
October 07, 2006

WHEN a young man walked into the emergency department of University Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, complaining of hiccups that had gone on for three days, the doctor who treated him, Francis Fesmire, had little idea he was about to make medical history.

His innovative solution to the problem - an uncomfortable one you might not wish to try at home - has now received the honour it deserves: an Ig Nobel Prize for research that "cannot or should not be reproduced".

After trying a variety of standard hiccup cures, such as pulling the patient's tongue and making him gag, Dr Fesmire decided on a new approach.

"Digital rectal massage was then attempted using a slow circumferential motion," he wrote in his seminal case report, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. "The frequency of hiccups immediately began to slow, with a termination of all hiccups within 30 seconds."

Dr Fesmire's unconventional therapy has since been replicated by Majed Odeh of Zion Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, with whom he shared the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine, in Harvard University's annual spoof of the real Nobel awards.