As an undergrad at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Burke was a Classical Studies major, writing papers about town planning in ancient Greece. Then he went to medical school, also at UNC. In 2001, he completed his residency at Duke University and started working as a board-certified anesthesiologist in hospital emergency rooms, intensive care units, and private surgery centers. It wasn't a career track you'd think would lead to detoxing bachelor-party casualties in a clinic that gets four miles per gallon, but that's what happened. Blame it on Vegas. And 2-year-olds. Burke came to Las Vegas in 2005, when his wife, who is also a doctor, obtained a position at a clinic there. Burke continued working as an anesthesiologist, and at some point it occurred to him that many of the symptoms that afflict patients after receiving anesthetics during surgery are similar to those that accompany hangovers: dehydration, nausea, headaches. To help his patients feel better as they recovered, Burke often gave them IV hydration along with intravenously administered painkillers and anti-nausea medication. Burke also tended to suffer from bad hangovers when he drank. "It's always been that way," he says on the phone couple weeks before my New Year's visit. "I'm in a Bordeaux Society; if I drink three glasses of wine, I get a pretty significant hangover. I like wine, I like to go out and have a good time, so that has always frustrated me." It frustrated him so much, in fact, that he began to wonder if the regimen he gave his patients recovering from surgery would work for him too. "A number of anesthetic medications affect the same receptors that alcohol does," he says. Eventually, he took home an IV bag, the tubing, and the medications and stored them in his home office. One day, after thinking about it for several months, he decided it was time to experiment. Hangovers make you feel miserable, Burke explains, because of four primary factors: dehydration, inflammation, acute alcohol withdrawal, and something called glutamine rebound, which occurs when the body tries to produce glutamine, a natural stimulant, at a higher-than-normal rate. "The glutamine rebound is what gives some people the shakes and the anxiety. When I have a hangover, I wake up at five in the morning and I can't go back to sleep." On this particular morning, Burke had the day off. His wife was on duty, so it was his job to shepherd their two high-energy toddlers all day, a responsibility that seemed daunting in his physically depleted state. "I was like, 'This is the morning. I've got eight hours of a 2-year old and a 4-year-old ahead of me. I'm not going to make it.'" Burke set up an IV bag in his office and inserted a catheter into his foot. "That's really the only place that's easy to start an IV on yourself," he says. "I let probably 300 or 400 cc's of fluid in." The hydration offered some relief, but not enough to declare victory over his hangover. "I said, 'OK, it's time to put the drugs in. Let's see what's going to happen with this.'" First, he added Zofran, an anti-nausea medicine. "After about 10 minutes, the nausea started melting away." Then, he added Toradol. "When I get hangovers, it feels like there's a vice on my head." The impact of the Toradol was dramatic, however. "Literally, within three minutes, it was like someone had unscrewed the vice. I was like, 'Good God, I can't believe I've been suffering all these years when I could have been done with it in 30 minutes." Burke found this breakthrough both exciting and unsettling. Nature is a vengeful god, and hangovers are often characterized as a natural law of sorts, the body's expression of its preference for temperance. Without hangovers as penance, would Burke lose all sense of restraint at his wine dinners? "Anesthesiologists have issues with drug abuse," he notes. "When I was a resident, there were two residents that had to go into rehab for abusing medication — because you're sitting there with all these narcotics around you, all these extremely powerful narcotics. So it was like, 'Is this really a road I want to go down, treating myself with IV medication?'" At the same time, a hangover that once would have kept him dragging for 10 to 12 hours could be largely vanquished within 45 minutes. On an individual basis, this was a pretty big deal. Writ globally, it was huge. A study published in the November 2011 issue of theestimated that impaired workplace productivity resulting from excessive alcohol consumption totaled $74.1 billion in 2006, and that workplace absenteeism cost another $4.2 billion that year. Meanwhile, as Jeffrey Wiese wrote in a study, "Hangover has never been shown to effectively deter alcohol consumption … and no evidence shows that alleviation of hangover symptoms would result in further consumption." In fact, hangover sufferers often drink more in their efforts to take the edge off with an "eye opener," aka hair of the dog. Wiese also pointed to previous studies that showed that hangovers can impair visual-spatial skills, dexterity, driving ability, managerial skills, and task completion. At the very least, an effective hangover cure could help alleviate millions of hours of human suffering. Ultimately, Burke decided, hangovers are a legitimate medical condition, not a moral judgment. "It's dehydration and inflammation. Treating it isn't really a whole lot different than treating people who get dehydrated from food poisoning." For Burke, then, treating himself — and others — with IV medication was a road he did indeed want to go down. In a giant bus, no less.