Doctors classify hiccups as intractable after they last a month. The patient described in a new case report had been hiccuping for seven years.
By the time this person arrived for an orthopedic operation, the list of failed treatments was long: chlorpromazine, baclofen, gabapentin, and injections into the cervical epidural space. None of it had worked. And now anesthesiologists faced a problem most of them will never encounter, which is how to run a surgery on someone whose diaphragm contracts involuntarily on its own schedule.
