What’s the best Way to cure a hangover? ome people, like those who don’t drink alcohol for health reasons or religious reasons or whatever, go their whole lives without ever suffering a debilitating hangover. They don’t know what they’re missing. Other people might drink to excess a time or two during their wild youth, wake up feeling terrible and then decide the whole binge drinking thing just isn’t for them. Other people might only endure a bad hangover or two a couple of times a year, after their birthday, maybe, or on New Year’s Day. For some of us, hangovers are a regular part of life. Maybe you work in a bar and your customers are always buying you drinks in the hope of seducing you or just because you’re damned likable. Maybe you’re a sommelier who doesn’t like to spit. Maybe, like me, you’re the host of a weekly drinking game at a local bar, and you always end up drinking more than any of the actual players. Or maybe you just like to drink. For the uninitiated, a hangover is the uncomfortable feeling that accompanies the morning after a night of heavy drinking. Symptoms include lightheaded-ness, nausea, fatigue, slowed down cognition and memory, and overall weakness. So, yeah, maybe you wake up with a hangover on a semi-regular basis. For me, it’s about two or three times a month. Hell, we’ll just call it once a week. Which is fine by me. My inner werewolf needs to be taken out for a walk about once a week. That, for me, is the ideal cycle of the
ancient saying, attributed to various sources, and sometimes called Petronius’ paradox: “Moderation in all things, including moderation.” I can impersonate a normal person for about five days a week, do all my grownup stuff and behave relatively civilly, but then once a week or so I need to cut loose, get buck wild, and make some bad decisions. That means that then, the next morning, on the seventh day, I have a hangover day, or, what some deities call it, a day of rest. I actually see some value in hangovers. I’m a busy guy, and usually have about 30 projects in the works, and am rarely able to find time for quiet reflection, to just sit there and vegetate. Hangovers can prompt personal reflection on some of life’s big questions—like, why did I drink so much last night? Is there some suppressed, deep-down personal misery that I’m trying to run away from? Where did I leave my wallet? Who is this person sleeping next to me? When I run into the bathroom, like I’m going to need to do here in a minute, should I kneel before the porcelain altar so I can vomit comfortably or should I sit on the toilet in case I get diarrhea, and just puke into the bathtub?
I recently asked Daniel R. Spogen, the chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Nevada, Reno’s medical school and a director on the American Academy of Physicians board of directors, to explain the cause of hangover symptoms. “Alcohol is a diuretic, and as you drink alcohol, you lose fluid volume,” he said. “This affects the hydration in the brain area, so basically the brain gets dehydrated. The symptoms that you get the day after are really caused by lack of hydration of the brain.” Spogen said that there’s a lot of genetic variation in the effects of hangovers. “There are a group of people who do not get hangovers, and the next day, they feel pretty good,” he said. “Whether or not their body can tolerate that amount of dehydration, it’s not quite understood, but one of the thoughts is that those are people who are more likely to become alcoholics because they don’t pay for it the next day.” This is why some people get hangovers after one drink, and other people can drink 10 drinks and feel fine. It’s still not clear why some of us have been known to drink like the hangover was a goal rather than a side effect of the endeavor. There are many schools of thought about the best ways to cure a hangover. Although I’m only 34, I’ve already done about 20 years of research on this subject. Here are my findings on the effectiveness of some of the most prevalent techniques for curing a hangover.
“ the hangover” continued on page 14
Photo illustration by Priscilla Garcia
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JULY 31, 2014
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RN&R
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