Everyone seems to have their own individualized plan for a hangover cure-all, be it a greasy breakfast from iHop, a classic combo of black coffee and Tylenol or just having another drink.
Whatever your go-to may be, there's never been a magic drink or pill that works for everybody -- until now.
Canadian writer Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall spent 10 years getting ripped in various locations around the globe (Las Vegas, Germany, Mexico and Austria, just to name a few) and trying different versions of hangover cures for each location. And it got real weird, to say the least.
All of Bishop-Stall’s findings are recorded in his new book, "Hangover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure."
“[Having a hangover is a] very obvious warning signal, but for some reason we don't tend to heed it. We all know it's coming, we know the warnings are there, and we keep drinking anyway,” Bishop-Stall stated in an interview.
According to the New York Times, there are three categories of hangover cures: those that help ease your pain without tackling the direct cause, those that take your mind off the hangover and those that make your pain immediately worse for a short period of time before making it go away.
Bishop-Stall, through his extensive research, found that hangovers are accelerated by two primary factors: dehydration and exhaustion. Alcohol, while making you sleepy, doesn’t allow your body to get the deep rest it needs to heal itself.
Bishop-Stall tried many remedies, including but not limited to filling his socks with hemlock, being buried in a pile of hay, squeezing lime into his armpit, eating wine-stuffed eel, taking kudzu-root pills, drinking prune juice and floating in an Austrian lake while listening to pan pipes.
Overall, what he found was that most of these “cures” actually made him feel worse.
He does claim that one cure is the best, but chances are you won't be able to buy it pre-made in a store anytime soon. The recipe entails combining milk thistle for your liver, N-acetylcysteine for your immune system, vitamins B1, B6 and B12, and frankincense and consuming it at night after some heavy drinking. Bishop-Stall swears that by morning, “you’ll still be tired, even exhausted, but otherwise things tend to be right as rain.”
“I didn't seriously think I could find a hangover cure," he says. "I wasn't even that perturbed by the idea of not finding one. I assumed that the last chapter of my book would be some sort of poetic, philosophical summation of the hopelessness of it all. So I was as surprised as anybody when I actually found some things that did eliminate the main symptoms of a hangover.”
Honestly, that’s all we can hope for. In the meantime, we'll stick to our McDonald's breakfast sandwiches and large coffees.