Fighting the hangover
Bill Rodgers
Issue date: 2/10/05 Section: ae
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With a sickening lurch you wake up on the morning after a night out with your friends and find that - somehow - your happy-go-lucky world of relative comfort has been replaced with an agonizing hell of tormented nausea.
As you sit up you feel your stomach heave as frigid beads of sweat form on your forehead. You feel as if someone is slowly trying to crush your brain between two monstrous ape-like hands.
As your hangover reduces you to a weak, whimpering ball of pain, there's only one thought going through your pounding head: "I'm never drinking again."
Know Your Enemy
Hangovers are the unfortunate price many people must pay after a night of drinking. Chances are, if you've drunk before, you have probably had a hangover at some point in your life.
What is a hangover, though? Surprisingly, little scientific research has been done on this beast of a medical condition. There's no concrete definition; a hangover is simply known as the after-effects of drinking too much. You know what a hangover is when you have one.
SoYouWanna.com, an online how-to guide, describes a hangover.
"A nasty hangover is Mother Nature's way of telling you, 'Fool, I told you not to drink so much. Now you gonna pay.'"
There are a number of symptoms associated with hangovers. They all can vary in type and severity depending on the person experiencing the hangover. Dr. Anil Minocha, a gastroenterologist, outlined the symptoms on his Web site DiagnosisHealth.com.
"In general, an alcohol hangover involves two or more of the following symptoms: headache, nausea, diarrhea, lack of appetite, shakiness, feeling tired and an overall feeling of being unwell. Simply put, it feels like the 'flu,'" Minocha said.
"[H]angover characteristics may depend on the type of alcoholic beverage consumed and the amount a person drinks," said Robert Swift of Brown University and Dena Davidson of the Indiana University of Medicine in a paper they published about hangovers.
As you sit up you feel your stomach heave as frigid beads of sweat form on your forehead. You feel as if someone is slowly trying to crush your brain between two monstrous ape-like hands.
As your hangover reduces you to a weak, whimpering ball of pain, there's only one thought going through your pounding head: "I'm never drinking again."
Know Your Enemy
Hangovers are the unfortunate price many people must pay after a night of drinking. Chances are, if you've drunk before, you have probably had a hangover at some point in your life.
What is a hangover, though? Surprisingly, little scientific research has been done on this beast of a medical condition. There's no concrete definition; a hangover is simply known as the after-effects of drinking too much. You know what a hangover is when you have one.
SoYouWanna.com, an online how-to guide, describes a hangover.
"A nasty hangover is Mother Nature's way of telling you, 'Fool, I told you not to drink so much. Now you gonna pay.'"
There are a number of symptoms associated with hangovers. They all can vary in type and severity depending on the person experiencing the hangover. Dr. Anil Minocha, a gastroenterologist, outlined the symptoms on his Web site DiagnosisHealth.com.
"In general, an alcohol hangover involves two or more of the following symptoms: headache, nausea, diarrhea, lack of appetite, shakiness, feeling tired and an overall feeling of being unwell. Simply put, it feels like the 'flu,'" Minocha said.
"[H]angover characteristics may depend on the type of alcoholic beverage consumed and the amount a person drinks," said Robert Swift of Brown University and Dena Davidson of the Indiana University of Medicine in a paper they published about hangovers.