When I was in grade school, one of my friends had this uncanny ability to stop from sneezing. Then one day, during recess, over two ice-cold chocolate milks, he shared his secret with me. When he felt a sneeze on its way, he bit down hard on his lower lip. He said this always stopped it.

There are other ways to stop air from shooting out of your mouth at 100 mph. Some examples are squeezing and pulling on your nose, blowing your nose or pinch/pull out hard on the spot between your eyebrows.

So why does it work?

The brain needs to focus so we are not blown away with all types of sensory information. If you add a certain stimulus before the sneeze starts, you overwhelm the ability of the brain to initiate that sneeze. It decreases the priority of irritation in your respiratory system so the sneeze information is lost and forgotten.

The same analogy applies to a dental device called DentaVibe™. When the dentist gives you an injection to stop pain during a procedure, the shot usually hurts. This product is placed near the spot where the needle will pierce skin. These vibrations send nerve impulses to the brain, overwhelming it’s ability to sense pain. Therefore pain is eliminated or significantly dampened during the injection.

This is just a high-tech product for what dentists have been manually doing for decades to your lip. Do you remember when your dentist is injecting, he wiggles your lip? That wiggling is just more sensory information. This touching, moving and pulling of the lip gives it priority over the feeling of injection pain.

The device is expensive costing about $700. This is another competitor called appropriately, Buzzy™. With a price of $100 they also include gel-pak that you freeze to help the vibrations numb the pain even more.

These products may also work well for blood draws, vaccinations and Botox injections.

Getting back to sneezing, never try to stop a sneeze if the process has already initiated. This can cause serious harm to your body, resulting in hearing loss and damage to blood vessels in your brain. Don’t be alarmed, this can usually only be serious if you make it a habit.

When your mom tells you that stopping a sneeze in mid-cycle is going to blow your brains apart, she is giving you true words of wisdom.

The question is what does a mother cat instruct her little pussy to do when she is about to sneeze?

Photo credit: Florian F. (Flowtography) / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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Categories: Health, Medications, Science-Technology

Tags: Botox injections, Buzzy, dental pain, DentalVibe, immunizations, lessening dental pain, sneezing, sneezing solutions, The Buzzy, vaccinations