Marcus Harrison drank so much cognac at a Memorial Day party a few years ago that when he tried to go to sleep, his bed started spinning. So he slept on the floor - and wasn't surprised when he felt terrible the next morning.
"I had a whole-day hangover," said Harrison, 38, a guest services employee at a Baltimore hotel.
Although he describes himself as only an occasional drinker, he has a preferred remedy for hangovers: one or two 10-ounce glasses of grapefruit or orange juice. He also quaffs Gatorade or some other sports drink, if he can find it.
"Always avoid coffee. Avoid anything with caffeine. It always dries you out," he says.
Good advice, it turns out. About two-thirds of us in the United States consume alcohol in some form, and with the New Year approaching tonight, some of us will do it to excess. As a result, millions will ring in 2005 tomorrow with personal remedies to treat the nausea, headache and upset stomach that inevitably follow.
"My cure is straight water and plenty of it, and drink it the night before, if you think of it, to dilute the impurities in the alcohol," advises Harrison's buddy, Michael Jackson, 32, who joined a discussion at the Midtown Yacht Club on a recent afternoon.
When he drinks, Jackson says, he sticks to beer because it minimizes the potential for a painful morning-after.
The basic cause of a hangover is well known: too much alcohol, consumed too quickly, drains the body of fluids.
"What a hangover is, primarily, is dehydration," said Siegfried Streufert, a psychologist at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse and an expert on alcohol's effects.
An effective, over-the-counter cure remains elusive. And experts say the only reliable home remedy is the one that has worked since the dawn of fermentation - rest and gradual rehydration.
Quick cures are hard to find because the mechanisms that trigger hangover symptoms - from nausea to that incessant, pounding headache - remain a mystery. "The overall cause is too much alcohol, but other than that, nobody really knows what causes a hangover," said Dena Davidson, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
The lack of a sure hangover cure may not be such a bad thing. Some health experts view hangovers as nature's way of limiting alcohol consumption. "If we did have a cure, you'd see a whole lot more drinking, and that would mean more of the problems that go with it," said Linda C. Degutis, a researcher and public health expert at Yale University.
