Ig Nobel

The Nobel Prize is based on a master-slave dialectic in the sense that, apart from the monetary prize, if society did not treat it as prestigious - even sacred - it wouldn't be. As such, it can often reward fairly orthodox, acceptable research.

It's a damn shame that the Ig Nobel must languish in the Nobel's haughty shadow.

...Fesmire, a specialist in emergency medicine and cardiology, probably did not have a real Nobel in mind when he published "Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage" in Annals of Emergency Medicine (vol 17, p 872). He was, it transpires, attempting to help a man who walked into the emergency room after hiccuping for 72 hours at up to 30 times a minute...

Runaway electrical impulses in the vagus nerve cause intractable hiccups, so Fesmire attempted to block them by stimulating the nerve. Gagging, tongue pulling, sinus massage and pressing the eyeball to stimulate the vagus all failed to stop the hiccups. Then he remembered reading about a case in which digital rectal massage – inserting a finger into a patient’s anus – had slowed a racing heartbeat, an effect similar to runaway hiccups.

"It worked, and the rest is history," he says. [via 3 Quarks]