Can Hiccups Be Cured?

A man walks into a pharmacy and asks the pharmacist if he has anything for hiccups. The pharmacist raises his hand and slaps the man across his face.

“Well, you don’t have the hiccups now, do you?” replied the pharmacist.

“No,” said the man, thrusting a finger at the door. “But my wife in the car still does!”

Don’t deny it, I know you’re laughing. At first I thought I’d post a pharmacy-related joke to give fellow pharmacy students something to raise their spirits, as the exam period is excruciatingly close and no doubt many of you, if the University of Manchester’s library is anything to go by, are working hard and late into the night in order to satisfy your brain’s constant self-criticism of never having done enough revision. I did laugh when I read this joke; although, if you ask anyone who knows me they will probably tell you that I laugh at anything really.

Funny, though, how training to become a pharmacist makes you analyse small things in certain ways. Obviously, hiccups are not at the top of pharmaceutical companies’ list of potential treatment research areas at the moment, but you do tend to wonder. For example, whatever I’m feeling or suffering from, whether it’s laziness or anger, procrastination or indeed the hiccups, I more often than not think “there must be a drug for this”.

The human body is an amazing labyrinth of discovered and undiscovered genius. There are many receptors, carrier proteins and other such structures within the body that can be and have been manipulated in order to cure varying conditions affecting humans. Many still remain to be discovered; most of the human genome had been mapped by 2003, a comparatively recent breakthrough, which leaves much hope for the future. The first lobotomies on live patients, before being retracted, began in 1946 to apparently cure mental health illnesses, so you never know, maybe one day scientists will discover a way to “cure” procrastination and other such blockbuster areas (well, from a student’s viewpoint anyway) a little less severely than by cutting connections to the brain!