I just overheard a guy at ihop say “how long would it take the world to realize that hiccups just disappeared forever” and honestly it’s fucking me up
Recent analysis suggests approximately 4000 admissions yearly in the USA for hiccups [4, 10•, 12]. The prevalence in hospitalized patients is 54 per 100,000 patients (0.054%) [8]. Overall, patients with temporary singultus composed 44.1% of patients, persistent hiccups 36.9%, and intractable 19% [5••]
(source)
so:
about 10 people per day get admitted to hospitals for hiccups in the USA. ~20% of those (so, about two per day) have “intractable hiccups”, which is defined as hiccups lasting longer than a month:
Hiccups can be acute, lasting less than 48 hours, persistent, lasting over 2 days, or intractable, lasting more than one month.
(source)
Now, a tempting calculation is that every day two people people get admitted for intractable hiccups, and intractable hiccups last at least a month, so at any given time there are at least 2×30=60 people with intractable hiccups. I don’t think this follows, because probably some of those people get admitted multiple times over the month; still, the number is not going to be negligible. And of course some of those ‘over a month’ episodes will last longer than a month. And that’s just people with intractable, not persistent, hiccups.
So there’s at any a time whole bunch of people with days- or weeks-long episodes of hiccups, and one day they all get cured. If any of them know each other, they are going to mention it and notice the coincidence. If any of their doctors know each other, likely same. I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a hiccups specialist doctor, but there are conditions with relatively high incidence of hospital-admissions-worthy hiccups (GERD, notably), so doctors in those areas are more likely to know, and know the doctors of, other patients with the same condition.
so with a lot of respect for the fetishist argument above I would propose either patients with chronic hiccups or their doctors will notice first, and within a few days.
Tags:
#nsfw text? #medical cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 