The Quest for a Hangover Cure

Part of getting deals done in China (in the old days) involved drinking.

After enough trial and error, I found I had luck with pre-gaming bioavailable pre-pre-precursors and water about 6 hours before drinking. More so than just water. Or just precursors.

The surprising bit I learned in some papers (in mice) was that glutathione precursors like NAC can actually do more liver damage if taken after drinking than just taking nothing. Timing seems to matter a lot.

That and there’s a bit of a difference between effective hangover prevention and after the fact hangover cure. The latter is kind of like asking how to uncrash a car. IV drips are very effective for symptom relief but the damage is already done.

As someone who A) likes to drink and B) gets truly horrendous hangovers (all-day, barely can get out of bed since age 22 hangovers) I've been pretty disappointed with the lack of research in hangovers. There's a "Alcohol Hangover Research Group" that meets yearly that I keep up with it but nothing major yet.

Personally my pet theory (as mentioned in the article) is there's more of an immune system reaction then people think. This would explain some of the difference in hangover sensitively and reactions, plus from my personal "experiments" I've noticed pseudoephedrine+painkiller really clears my hangovers up sometimes, much like a bad head cold. On the other hand, it doesn't work every time making me thing that some hangovers are immune-system based, some acetaldehyde based, some dehydration, etc. Plus there's the effects of the beverages drunk and low level gluten or hops intolerance.

DHM-based (Cheers and Zaca usually) and Zbiotics are the best preventatives I've tried so far; they won't stop everything but I do feel a bit better the next day after taking them compared to without. All three are very expensive unfortunately and none are better than the greatest preventative of all: drinking water throughout the night :) .

After 20 years of waking up nearly every day with at least a low-grade hangover, I finally found something that works to prevent hangovers 100% of the time!

It’s called “getting surgery and experiencing anesthetic epiphany” - 15 months so far with no booze.

When I was in college a doctor told me a trick. I did the trick and I never got a hangover again.

The trick: put a 3-liter (that's right, three liters) plastic bottle of water on your bed pillow before you go out drinking. When you arrive back home, drink all of it. (You place it on your pillow so that it will remind you, in case you forget.) There's a time element involved, because you can't exactly drink three liters of water in a minute. But take the time and drink the water.

I never got a hangover again. I did feel a little seasick once or twice, in the morning, after a particularly hard night out. But no pounding headache, etc.

just don't drink