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“No compelling evidence exists
to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is
effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover."-British Medical Journal, 2005,
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Sometimes, you just have to suffer through the hangover.
Discuss . . .
As the saying goes, the only cure for a hangover is 48 hours….
Hair of the dog. Wake up and drink. Not that its a good idea but it does work in delaying the pain. Though drinking lots of water and eating saolty food helps as you bite
The trouble with hair of the dog is that an even bigger dog often bites you the next day.
There is no cure, but mild symptoms are treatable. Aspirin and water are good for the head if your stomach can tolerate them. Angostura Bitters and soda is helpful in settling the stomach.
You are referring to the mortgage situation, aren’t you? ;)
drink gatorade to rehydrate and go back to bed. if it’s a thursday night and you’ve got to be up early on friday, drink a BIG gatorade and it’s money in the bank you’ll get out of bed at a bare minimum to take a leak…you might even stumble to work :)
There is no problem. The Fed never takes away the punch bowl anymore….
Lots of water before you hit the hay helps. If you don’t mind getting up a couple of times during the night to pee.
I find ibuprofen helps.
Personally, I am a big fan of menudo (the mexican soup, not the band). Taking Advil before you hit the hay also helps a lot…
My cousin taught me about Goody’s Medicated Powder, you rip open a packet and shake it under your tongue.
He brings me a box whenever he visits from Florida; can’t buy Goody’s in the Boston area. It’s a combination of aspirin, acetomophin (tylenol) and caffeine in powdered form…
Oh, yeah, you then rinse and swallow with a beer…
When I was in the military we would take 500mg of aspirin and then give ourselves an IV. It is the quickest way to recover from a hangover.
Getting hammered is no fun.
Hey, I know this hasn’t been said yet, but the old wives’ remedy of a fried egg on a hamburger steak has always worked for me. That and Campari and soda.
albrt, Angostura Bitters is 40 proof. Same as a hair of le dog.
A champaigne breakfast works for me.
I just try to drink good single malt scotch whenever possible …don’t know why, but I’ve never had a hangover from it.
First and foremost a hangover is about dehydration.
Drink lots and lots of water or gatorade, and take two or three aspirin.
Don’t eat solid food until you are well on the road to recovery.
Per my father, a pharmacist his entire adult life, Aspirin is the last thing you need the day after a bender.
Tylenol is toxic to your liver. And, if you’re a heavy drinker, tylenol has better than even odds of contributing to liver failure if you use it regularly and drink regularly.
I too am feeling like crap today, but Coffee and Gatorade (or any other electrolye and caffeine combo) have helped tremendously.
Don’t mess with Aspirin. I have heard real honest-to-god non-anecdotal stories of people who didn’t know they were allergic suffering immediate, irreversible liver failure due to combining booze and Tylenol.
PSA off.
First and foremost a hangover is about dehydration.
Drink lots and lots of water or gatorade, and take two or three aspirin.
Don’t eat solid food until you are well on the road to recovery.
Posted by: mock turtle | Jan 1, 2008 10:15:59 PM
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
little more than just dehydration….
jump in the pacific ocean circa san francisco. your hangover will be gone and you will be very awake.
It think you’ll find that dehydration is a major part of the problem. Check out the symptoms of dehydration outside the low urine output since your body is using water to dilute the alcohol remnants.
I’ve found that drinking water throughout the night as well as a large amount right before turning in really limits or avoids the suffering the next day. Also, eating proteins (steak) and fats (cheese) rather then carbs (skip the potato and bread) will slow the effects of the alcohol and moderate the suffering the next day.
why do i not have a hangover?
Quote of the Day
“No compelling evidence exists to suggest that any conventional or complementary intervention is effective for preventing or treating alcohol hangover.” – British Medical Journal, 2005 Thanks to Barry Ritholtz for this gem….
You can only treat the symptoms:
As was said above, coffee, ibuprofen and lots of liquids with electrolytes (Gatorade, vitamin water etc.) should help.
Prevention has been known to work, but subject compliance to this form of therapy is remarkably low. :-D
Here’s a novel idea. How about having a little restraint and not drinking to excess? Silly, I know, to think that adults might be able to control themselves but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway ;)
Drink less of those alcoholic beverages and do other things that can be fun. You can use your imagination on this. Plan a little beyond drinking. Be creative, but drink less. Be coherent enough to create a lasting memory of happiness that you will actually remember fondly instead of pain. That sounds like a plan to me.
It’s been twenty years since I’ve had anything to drink(thank you God for forcing that choice on me) but I seem to remember that the worst hangovers are caused more by the sugary alcoholic drinks(rum and coke, vodka and OJ). So if you skip the sweet stuff you’ll be less likely to have the throb in the morning
I just don’t drink. It is the best cure for a hangover. My highs all come from being glad to live another day and knowing I have a purpose for being on this planet
Gatorade or other electrolyte works well. Put a pinch of salt in a glass of water if all else fails.
Also very good– drink a pint of high quality loose leaf green tea before you start drinking, or during, or at bedtime. The theanine in green tea is very helpful in the metabolization of alcohol. Don’t be thinking you will get anything good out of a cheap bag of tea, though. Loose leaf, preferably organic. Or you can take it as a supplement: http://www.lef.org/newshop/items/item00555.html
Also helpful– antioxidants. Here is a nice blend that definitely helps: http://www.lef.org/newshop/items/item00802.html
I say: Treat the symptom not the problem! A common cure for the ancient Greeks was sprinkling amethyst powder into their drinks. I haven’t checked the price on amethyst and it’s too late to cure last nights hangover with amethyst dust, but just because my house is worth less than I owe doesn’t mean I can’t keep charging my frivolous expenses to my credit card to pay for the hangover cure that I’m sprinkling in my hair of the dog. Right?
By the way Byno…
I’m not sure the connection between asprin and Tylenol…
Tylenol contains no asprin, yes?
Best cure for a hangover is another bite from the hair of the dog that bit you the night before . Preferably with tomato juice .
This is the bible of hangover avoidance and recovery:
http://health.howstuffworks.com/hangover.htm
I’m a big fan of prevention, meaning drinking water before going out and sipping it while drinking. At night, I’ll drink some more water, perhaps a gatorade, and even eat a banana if handy. Can’t say I never get hangovers, but they are rarely as bad as they were before I read this…
My post-mortem bits…
When I was in the military, the best cure for a hangover was sitting in the pilots seat and inhaling LOX (not the bagel), liquid oxygen turned gas that the pilots breathe at high altitude. Worked everytime.
The hair of the dog is a phrased reused that meant to put a hair from a dog that bit you in your wound so that you don’t get rabies.
While dehydration is commonly attributed to hangover, a bit of common sense would rule it out. Did the sailor of yore always have an aversion to light and a headache when they consumed much more alcohol than water??? Do you feel like a train ran you over after you finish a run??? On a long hot summer day at the park, do you feel like shriveled paper or post-bender???
Massive consumption of alcohol goes hand-in-hand with massive consumption of sugar and carbonation. Champagne is renowned for killer hangovers while smooth sipping high quality vodka is not.
Finally, does anyone know of a keyboard that is totally silent because the clacking of these keys is too loud. =
I was going to comment that I always found water to be a big help, but from the above it seems everyone already knows about it! I believe there is a reasonable scientific explanation for this: the kidneys use up bodily reserves of water in eliminating the alcohol. If you run out of water, you stay drunk (i.e., alcohol stays in the blood) until you drink some more. Sleep all night in such a state and you’ll feel pretty miserable indeed! But drinking water afterwards will still help greatly.
With this in mind, I noted with amusement that a) water was listed in the BMJ paper as an “internet cure” and b) the following comment appears in the conclusion of the paper:
The paucity of randomised controlled trials is in stark contrast to the plethora of “hangover cures” marketed on the internet. This confirms the unreliability of the internet in healthcare matters.
This quote is accompanied by a reference to a paper entitled “Assessing websites on complementary and alternative medicine for cancer“.
This kind of prejudiced and sloppy thinking is ubiquitous in medical journal literature. It is moreover absurd to reject claims on the grounds that there are no randomized controlled clinical trials, when there are obvious practical reasons why there will never be randomized controlled clinical trials. The old saw about absense of evidence is especially true when your standards of evidence are unreasonable. Who in their right mind refuses to believe anything for which there is no proof conforming to the highest available scientific standard??
My chemistry training tells me that ethanol is very dissolvable in water, since both are highly polar molecules, so the more water consumed, the more alcohol will hydrogen-bond to it, and be flushed out faster.
Le Chatelier’s Principle, and all that.
But that’s just a guess.