by Graham Duke

Created on: May 29, 2008

As layman's medical understanding goes, the hangover is one of the most frequently suffered medical conditions, but one of the least well understood. As hangover is a double-edged sword. Nausea and vomiting are a result of changes in fluid pressure in the inner ear, while headache results from dehydration.

When there is a high concentration of alcohol in the blood stream, this alcohol diffuses into the fluid sacs within the inner ear that control our sense of balance and head position. The flow of alcohol into the fluid bends the sensitive hairs that detect the fluid sloshing around under normal circumstances. This gives you the drunken "spinning" sensation and affects your ability to drive and walk. The confusion of your inner ears believing that you are moving and your eyes believing that you are not causes your brain to believe you are poisoned and the nausea is a natural reaction to remove any poison from your system.

Just as the inflow of alcohol causes dizziness and nausea during drunkenness, the outflow of alcohol from the alcohol-rich fluid into the bloodstream which has now been de-alcoholized causes the nausea of a hangover. In fact a drunk person's eyes will track to the right as they attempt to fix a position in their spinning world and a hungover person's eyes will track to the left as the sensitive hairs of the inner ear bend in the opposite direction.

"Hair of the dog" is a medically effective hangover cure. Hair of the dog is quite simple too - the cure is to drink alcohol, thereby raising the blood alcohol level. The closer the level of alcohol in the blood to the level of alcohol in the inner ear, the more slowly it will diffuse across the membrane and the less severe the hangover will be. While it is counterintuitive that drinking alcohol could remedy an illness caused by the drinking of alcohol, the notion of bringing alcohol levels down in the blood and the ear together is sound.

As for the dehydration aspect, the best cure is prevention. Drinking a lot of water while still drunk and before going to sleep will allow the dehydrated body to rehydrate over night. The reason we become dehydrated from alcohol consumption is twofold. Usually when we're drinking heavily we're consuming a lot of fluids and when your overall hydration gets too high, the body naturally produces less AHD (Antidiuretic Hormone) and this deficiency of ADH causes the kidneys to dump excess water into the bladder. After we stop drinking, it takes a while for the ADH levels to come back up to normal, so we've dumped a little more water than we needed to. Simultaneously, alcohol has a diuretic effect itself, causing even more water to be dumped from our systems. All told, the cure for dehydration is simple - drink water.

While many people will tell you to drink raw eggs or eat toast, when it comes down to it a hangover is a medical condition we understand very well with two symptoms to alleviate - nausea caused by inner ear alcohol flow and headache caused by dehydration. Aspirin may relieve the headache and gravol may relieve the nausea, but curing the disease rather than the symptoms is as simple as taking alcohol and water.

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