Why take something for free and feel cheap if you can pay half a grand and support quackery? Precisely! Hangovers from alcohol are almost entirely due to dehydration, read: too little water in your body. Although you drank a lot of water along with the spirit, the alcohol made your body dehydrate; no matter you didn’t even dance enough to break a sweat. Our bodies also do not like the alcohol metabolites, the main problem being acetaldehyde from the action of the liver enzyme alcohol-dehydrogenase, and then acetic acid. I wrote about these and why Asians should be especially careful with booze in “Alcohol in China and Enzyme Evolution”.

Now the revolutionary science: Dehydration means lack of water. Water - you can drink that stuff. Wait, wait, that’s not all. Toxins in your body are mostly removed by the kidneys, meaning you urinate them out, and you urinate more if you have a lot of water in you. You can drink water, did I mention that? So, if you had too many strong alcoholic drinks, then before going to sleep, best even before leaving the venue, drink one liter of water, better yet more. Water (!), not coffee with chilli hot sauce or whatever you read on Huffington Post's miracle hangover cures. Plain water, however much you hate drinking one more drop, force it down. You will be thanking yourself the next day, as there will be much less of a hangover, often none at all. It is that simple because hangovers are almost entirely about dehydration only.

But science, just water, stuff to do with toilets – that does not sound like the American way things are done. From now on, starting on the 16thof April, you can pay Hangoverheaven up to 500 dollars for intravenous water. After all, a night long of drinking too much of stuff that you hardly know what is in it, who knows what dangers drinking a liter of water can present. So you better let somebody stick a needle in your arm to do it IV! Eat my shorts, cumbersome stone-age era forcing water down my throat without a physician present.

The expensive IV of course contains a “proprietary blend”, as if we do not know that it is salt water (Ringer's solution) and a few vitamins that don’t do nothing but help the guys claim “proprietary blend” – oh yes, and some anti-inflammatory, think aspirin, and an antiemetic against the nausea, which should raise the actual value to about 50 cents. A good portion of pseudo-science drivel can’t be left out in order to add placebo effect for the gullible rich: “to drive the toxins out of your system and get you tuned up to enjoy your stay in Las Vegas”.

“Toxins out of your system” almost always means money out of your pockets. Let me repeat the cutting edge science about how toxins get out of your system: After drinking a lot of water, you are going to pee a lot! It is called “urination”; it is usually for free, although possibly there are soon buses driving around offering sticking a needle into your bladder to relieve that crazy pain down there: Feel like Hell? Only 200 dollars and it will go away like magic in less than 45 minutes so you can enjoy Las Vegas!

Your urine takes away toxins, that is why you should think twice about gargling urine to whiten your teeth and avoid entirely anything that sounds like Urine Therapy: Nature's Elixir for Good Health or Your Own Perfect Medicine. Sure these are much worse quackery, but the following is equally mere driving money out of pockets rather than toxins out of your body:

The cost for in-room treatment is $500 for the first person and $375 for each additional person. This service is available from 8am to 4pmMondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. The in-room treatment consists of an actual doctor coming to your room and administering two bags of IV fluids, IV anti-nausea medicine, IV anti-inflammatory medicine, and IV vitamins.

The funniest about this has got to be “8am to 4pm”. Maybe I am just unfamiliar with partying in Las Vegas, but as far as I know, if you wait all the way till 8am, hangover is already pounding your skull from the inside and your eyes feel like sandpaper. Now you may think that an IV will help right away, but the treatment takes 45 minutes (not including going there or waiting for them). 45 minutes is what it takes for example an antiemetic to enter your blood stream if you eat one.

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