Why Do I Get the Hiccups?
The other day I got an attack of hiccups. My grandmother’s cure was to blow into a paper bag. She didn't know anything about neurological reflexes or phrenic and vagus nerves, which carry the hiccup messages, but her old folk remedy seemed to work. It probably did so by taking advantage of the body’s response to abnormal levels of carbon dioxide in the lungs and the blood stream. After a few breaths, the air in the bag has a much higher carbon dioxide concentration than normal. In response, our respiratory sensors in the brain call for stronger and deeper breaths. This regularizes the contractions of the diaphragm and often eliminates the spasm.
Hiccups have no known physiological function. They are a normal and frequent event in the underwater life of the fetus. Hiccups often continue to afflict newborn babies for quite a while after birth. For adults, they may well be just an annoying vestige left over from our life in the womb.
The many folk cures for hiccups, like swallowing without breathing, or being subject to a fright, probably work for the same reason the paper bag works. They raise the level of carbon dioxide in the blood stream. In extreme intractable cases, drugs may help and as a last resort even surgical crushing of the phrenic nerve has been tried.
So next time you get hiccups, remember that sometimes things happen in the body that have no known purpose.
There are things in life which indeed seem to serve no particular purpose. They don’t make us healthier or wiser or happier. They don’t make our communities or countries better. They just are.
It is hard to wrestle with the question of why something exists or happens if it has no apparent purpose. We can always hope that there is a purpose, but that we don’t see it or understand it just yet. Maybe one day we’ll find out that hiccups are more than irritating phrenic nerve twitches. But maybe we won’t.
As we try to understand the world we live in and our experiences in it, we attempt to answer the question “Why?” What we are asking in effect is “What purpose does this serve?” We want to know what causes things to happen. We look back to preceding conditions and events that set up this eventuality.
But that is only part of the answer to the question “Why?” The other part is a more philosophical query. It scans the bigger horizon: “Why does this always (or never) happen to me?” “Why did this happen?” It looks to the future: “What does and will this mean to me?” “What purpose does this thing or event have in my life?”
The answers to these questions are typically constructed according to the view one holds of the grand scheme of life. A naturalistic world-view is challenged to answer the question of purpose if things happen by chance or coincidence. A spiritual world-view will provide some sort of answer to the question of meaning and purpose. It will not necessarily give us the kinds of precise answers and neat packages which we would like, but it will provide a framework within which to address such issues.
Purposes imply that there is a goal. The intent of a purpose is to move one nearer to that desired end. The purposes that I have in studying, working, parenting, befriending, homemaking, playing or worshipping all serve to bring me closer to the object of my activity. My activities reveal my values.
When Christians have considered the questions of mankind’s purpose in life, they have inevitably put God front and center. To the question “What is the chief end of man?” the Christian answers “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” It is, or should be, in light of this fact that we live and find our purpose.
Today give some thought to your purposes, values and goals in life. What kind of person will you be when you attain them? What makes these goals worthy?
David Humphreys and Debbie Hughes
© August 2004
