Question and answer: Lisa’s eight years of hiccups

ITV’s This Morning program presented, on November 12, 2015, a medical mystery: a woman named Lisa who says she has suffered hiccups for all of the past eight years. Ig Nobel Prize winner Dr. Francis Fesmire discovered, years ago, an answer which may be unknown to the This Morning: digital rectal massage.

ITV says:

today Dr Dawn Harper and Dr Ranj Singh are here… with our live case study Lisa Graves, who hasn’t been able to stop hiccupping for eight years after they began following the birth of daughter Emily in 2008. Can Dr Dawn and Dr Ranj help the woman who has had the hiccups for over eight years?

Dr. Fesmire was awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, for his medical case report “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage” [Annals of Emergency Medicine, vol. 17, no. 8, August 1988 p. 872].

Sad to say, Dr. Fesmire died in 2014, and so is not available to appear on the This Morning program and save the day. We hope some kind soul will alert the This Morning doctors so that they can supply appropriate advice, and perhaps corresponding medical services, to Lisa Graves.