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Hiccups persist for more than one hour.
You've been having bouts of hiccups several times a day or several days a week. You also have chest pain, heartburn or difficulty swallowing. For all the advances of medicine over the years and decades, science still has not found a sure cure for those annoying little spasms that temporarily make you sound like the town drunk. A normal hiccup is just an audible tic. The phrenic nerve that excites the muscles of the diaphragm, for reasons unknown, lapses into uncontrollable spasms, says Ravinder K. Mittal, M.D., an associate professor of medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.